Next stop was Makarora, in the Mount Aspiring National Park, for a night's stay. We were in the middle of nowhere, in the valley of the mountain ranges. We spent the evening laughing at the various karaoke efforts but we both managed to abstain for everyone else's sake! On the way there, we stopped off at Lake Matheson which we were really looking forward to but the weather was atrocious and we were unable to see much at all. We went to Queenstown from there and...

Our ferry was due to leave Wellington for the South Island at 8am so we had an early start anyway but we were actually woken up by a very drunk guy in our dorm room. He was being really noisy trying to get down from his bunk bed and then I realised that he had made his way to the window and was trying to wee out of it! He was clearly very drunk and had no idea that he wasn't in the toilet but I quickly shouted and him and told him where the door was. I had to ope...

It has been a month since we wrote a blog and we have literally not stopped moving about for the whole time. We hopped back on the Stray bus and headed towards Raglan for a night. The is New Zealand premier surf spot, with one of the world's best left-handed surf breaks. We spent the afternoon playing on the flying fox and rope course which were at the accommodation and sitting on the sun terrace overlooking the beautiful bay. We left the next day for Maketu, vi...

Tairua is a small town of around 1500 people set inside the Coromandel National Park. We were lucky enough to be invited to stay with Tim and Heather Gale, two former pupils of mine from Instow, North Devon, in their holiday home on Mount Paku. The 3 storey, glass fronted house overlooks the harbour and is absolutely amazing. The weather for the first couple of days was really good and we managed to get to a couple of beaches. The first was Ocean Beach, which is...

We arrived to Auckland at 4am in the morning after a 13 hour flight. We were initially told that our flight reservation was not valid but, thankfully, after a fair bit of stress, we made it on to the flight. We caught the shuttle into the downtown area and had a quick shower and change before heading out for a cup of tea and a stroll around the wharf. We then headed to a shopping outlet centre for a bit of retail therapy (well in Ali's case anyway). After a ta...