Clearly for me the most significant and exciting event of the week was a visit from my girlfriend Alice, who had managed to wangle enough days off to make the trip out. We decided to hire a car to get around the North Island, but given it was so much more cost effective to collect it from Auckland airport, I found myself on a bus at 7am (with thanks to Dom for getting me to the station) on the way up to the airport. Fortunately I arrived with enough time to go up to Auckland's viewing deck, and watched the Qantas 737 land which was carrying Alice. Personally I think it's a shame the majority of airports don't have these viewing decks anymore, as it's almost taken some of the romance and excitement out of flying.
Unfortunately following previous delays with our training I wasn't able to get leave to cover Alice's stay, so I was expecting a couple of events during the week. Annoyingly one of these ended up being a 5 hour briefing on visual navigation, but luckily for me my manager Troy did one of my sim flights before the brief so that I could have a collection of days off. The sim itself was quite interesting as Troy got me to perform a GPS flight from Hamilton to Roturua, with a procedural approach, go around and hold, all without outside reference. For the moment we will revert back to visual flight, but it's nice to have a better appreciation of navaids we can use to aid orientation during navigation.
Alice and I took the opportunity to use the three days off i'd be given to get around the North Island as much as possible, so on Thursday we were up early and on the road to the Wairere falls. After a pretty speedy climb (even though I was winding Alice up about how slow we were going), we enjoyed the view, had some lunch, then were back in the car on the way to Rotoruq. Here we visited Hells gate, and even though the sulphur has left all my towels absolutely stinking, the mud bath was quite a fun experience. 
Given how stinky Rotorua is, we didn't want to spend the night there, so drove south to Taupo. It's low season in Taupo so finding a decent room was pretty easy, and we even managed to get one with a jacuzzi bath........which still didn't shift the smell of sulphur! After a pretty decent sleep, we had a monster breakfast, ate ice cream in a DC3 (McDonalds have a DC3!), then went to the Huka falls on the way back to Hamilton. 
The few days off continued and we managed to get across to Raglan beach to watch the sun disapear over the Tasman, then on Saturday a long drive up into the Coromandel Penninsula to visit the famous Cathedral cove. Amazingly, there was a point when we had the secluded beach to ourselves for about 20 minutes, quite a moment to be the only two people on one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Sunday saw me back training, where I had my first nav flight with Scott. The trip we flew was fairly simple, being the one planned during the monster brief we'd had earlier in the week, but nonetheless quite interesting as I got a new perspective on New Zealand. As expected there are areas I need to tidy up but nothing disastrous, so i'm excited for my next nav trip.
And finally, with our last few hours of free time we went to the Waitomo caves on a subterranean trip I will never forget! After a huge amount of effort getting into our wetsuits, we followed the guides down into the darkness, and began to explore the cave system. At points we switched our lights off, and the only illumination was light from the glow-worms that lined the ceilings of the tunnels and caverns. Nice to know that the light is actually created by mucus, but that's not nearly as exciting! The only bad thing about the tour was an eel about the size of my arm making an appearance, but after the racket we made jumping over waterfalls, it didn't show itself again.
Alice has now left New Zealand, and after stopping in Sydney she's now steaming west towards the Indian Ocean and the next stop in Dubai. Hopefully given how much more flying I have to do ill be busy enough that the time will go quickly. Here's hoping!!
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