Kia Ora,

And so it begins, the Kiwi Experience adventure bus trip for the next 28days! We had an early departure from our hostel in Mount Eden and a sad farewell from our fellow Canadian friend Chandra, dedication was shown as she made the early rise with us for a farewell brekkie and walk to the bus stop.

We started our trip on board the kiwi experience bus trip, our bus driver Dylan was great he was so funny and got us all excited about the month ahead. Firstly we drove up to Mount Eden which is a dormant volcano, the views were spectacular and the sun was shining! Mt Eden is still in Auckland and the views over look the city. We were told that on one April fool's day a group of Uni students had arose early and ventured to the volcano with a pile of wood and car tyres and started a fire, by 6am the mayor had concerns, by 7am he had the city evacuated and by 8am all the connecting suburbs. Haha he was pretty embarrassed after remembering it was a dormant volcano.

We then headed down to Haiha beach for dinner and sun bathe, the weather has definitely been on our side so far because it's been about 26 degrees every day. The beach was amazing and New Zealand still holds up to its reputation of stunning scenery. We then headed off to mercury bay where we stayed in a hostel called turtle cove which was one of the better ones it passed Hayley's approval.

That night we had just finished our tea and somebody runs into the room shouting there's a tsunami coming!!! There's a tsunami coming!! Apparently there was an earthquake just off the coast of Japan and it had put NZ on high tsunami alert. Everybody was a bit frantic so we turned the news on straight away only for our fears to be confirmed. The earthquake was much worse than we had anticipated and totally devastated Japan. The main alert had went out to the northern tip of NZ where we had just been the day before on our road trip; cape Reinga!! However we were still in north New Zealand so were on high alert. Since there is a big group of us on the kiwi bus you do have the odd idiot who dramatises everything which makes it worse. The tsunami was calculated to hit at 6am in the morning so we went to bed terrified anticipating the tsunami siren to go off in the middle of the night so we would be evacuated. However i wasn't that scared because I had the top bunk, Lou and Hayley would go first because they were on the bottom bunks haha but seriously all jokes aside...... At this point me and Louise were thinking "what next" we've dodged the Brisbane floods, the Queensland cyclone, the Christ church earthquake and now a tsunami not bad in the space of 5 months!

WE ARE ALIVE!!! Morning came and we were all dry and in one piece we all got up to check the news and heard the news that NZ had been taken off tsunami alert because the tsunami had died out by the time it hit Hawaii. However new footage was coming out from the Japanese earthquake and it showed the tsunami wave that hit Japan and it looked like it just destroyed everything in its path.

After mercury bay we headed for the town of Roturua the 4th most geothermal active place on the planet. For people who don't know what geothermal activity is well.......it's just steam that comes out of the rocks and s***. On the way to Roturua we stopped off at blue lake which is a nice swimming place, this is where we had lunch and topped up our tan because the weather was still great.

Off to the town of Roturua!

Love Adam Louise and Hayley xxx