As my flight back home departed from Auckland, I decided to stay there for a few days and knows the place !

The city kinda reminds me of Wellington but WAY bigger! There are LOTS of brazilians in the streets… It’s really impressive… I think that Auckland was the place where we felt more comfortable!

We also visited an awesome aquarium out there! Everything is on the pictures :

Taupo is a city in the middle of the New Zealand north island, surrounded by 3 big vulcans and a huge lake!

You can’t say that’s not beautiful!… In our first breakfast (we took a overnight bus to get there, coming from Wellington), we ate with a nice view of the lake and with the vulcan in the background! But nothing is perfect: The city is quite expensive!

In Taupo you can bungy jump, sky dive, kaiak… There are many extreme sports to do, but everything is expensive! Usually each “adventure” costs about 100 NZ Dollars per person! Considering that you can do 3 per day, it can be really hard for your pocket!

If you rent a car you can go to the national park, which is full of hikes! You can also run around the entire lake!

As I was there for one day only and also running low money, I chose to do a boat ride at the Huka Falls! The water fall is really beautiful, and also the rivers around… You really fell into a Lord of the Rings scene! The boat is really fast and can do 360 spins, which makes the ride really awesome!

There’s also a hot water river (42 Celsius Degrees!) that ends in the same river where the boat rides!

Over there you can find some of the pics I shot in Taupo:

Sorry about the lack of updates! I had a problem in the translation system of the blog!

New Zealand is awesome! As always everybody was really friendly and receptive… Just the weather is a bit weird: REALLY windy and it changes from a strong sun to something really cold in minutes!

Almost all the competitiors are already here. Some of them had problems with flights and luggage but everything was solve! We’re already training a lot and the competitions will probably be real fun!

The organization is a simpler than the 2008 World Champs but still quite awesome! We already filmed and shot some nice pics! I hope to be able to post everything really soon! For now I posted some pics that I liked:

PS: Last 3 pics by Miles Ornish!

The interview that I gave for the Planeta EXPN program on the ESPN Channel was uploaded! Unfortunately they only uploaded one of three parts: http://www.planetaexpn.com.br

For those who didn’t watch it, I just uploaded on Vimeo! It have 30 min and is divided in 2 parts:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cya!