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...

We travelled from Mendoza, Argentina to Santiago, Chile on a 7 hour bus ride going straight through the Andes. The scenery was absolutely spectacular. We had a slightly arduous customs crossing, where they literally took everything for searching and confiscated our delicious bag of lunch!We arrived to the hostel, Casa Roja, which we had selected purely on the basis of the swimming pool (complete with swim-up bar!). It was a huge mansion converted into a hostel fo...

We arrived in Buenos Aires on 2nd February, and checked into our hostel called "The Clan". It´s a huge hostel situated in the heart of Centro from where the whole city is accessible by the metro. As we sat eating breakfast, our friends, the swedes Christoffer and Mikael surfaced (who we had previously spent time with in Buzios and Party). We were fairly jaded from the 18 hour bus journey so spent the first day uploading pictures to the blog and sitting...