The North Island of New Zealand is full of rolling green hills, but this place takes it to a whole new level. This is taken from the top of Te Mata Peak in the Hawkes Bay area along the east coast of the North Island. We stopped here on our initial journey across New Zealand when we first arrived here and stayed in this area for a few days.

There is a road all of the way to the top of Te Mata peak which makes getting to this spot very easy. We ended up being on the top of the peak late one day and watched the sun set and then drove back down to the bottom of the road where we stayed the night (they don’t allow people to stay overnight on top of the peak otherwise we would have been all over that). It turns out that the small gravel parking lot that we parked the van in overnight is also a meet-up place for local teenagers and, being a weekend, we spent all night listening to cars driving in and out, loud music and kids yelling to their friends. Needless to say we didn’t get much sleep, and when it was time to wake up for the sunrise it was difficuly to get motivated.

When we finally got to the peak and the sun began to rise over the ocean, however, it was all made right. After the sunrise we made breakfast at the peak and it was possibly the best plate of scrambled eggs I’ve had!

This photo is actually several photos that have been stitched together in a wide panorama. I put on my 30mm lens, put the camera on its side and took a bunch of pictures side by side with about 30% overlap between each one. I then stiched them together in Lightroom. The greens and yellows in the hills of New Zealand are so unique and are colours that I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world.