We arrived in Wellington on Monday in the pouring rain! The mist was so thinck we could not actually see the city across the harbour! This has been the theme unfortunately for the last few days - rain! On sunday we had planned to do a walk in the Tongariro National Park. We knew that we could not do the famous Tongariro Crossing because the weather is still too bad here and we would have had to hire boots, crampons, ice axes, etc, which was well out of our bud...

Driving to Taupo the weather was nice and the forecast for the next few days wasn't great.Andrew kept saying that we may have to do the skydive today but I was not so sure about that! On arriving in Taupo we headed straight for the airport to compare prices and try and get a skydive booked for tomorrow. In the one company Skydive Taupo we were told that there was a plane going up with spaces in an hours time, our pulses definitely quickened on hearing this news...

After getting up very early to sneak out of the hostel car-park we had parked in to meet our mates we set off to the rafting centre. We had decided we enjoyed white water rafting so much in Peru that we would go down the highest commercially raftable waterfall in the world - a drop of 7m!! It was also a grade higher than we had done in Peru, it went up to grade V. Slightly nervous and apprehensive we got our wetsuits on and jumped into the van to take us to the...

Yes this place does stink!! I can't believe Sarah was not woken up by the smell as she dutifully slept in the passenger seat leaving me to navigate into the city map-free!! Luckily Rotorua is more of a town than a city!!We arrived here early afternoon and headed straight to the tourist office to find something to do for the afternoon/evening, having already booked a white-water rafting trip for Friday morning. First we headed to Hells Gate which is a big geother...

We made really good process after our caving adventures, probably thanks to a 1kg bag of sweets we brought in the petrol station!! So we ended up driving a lot further on than we had originally hoped so we only had a short 50km drive on a dirt track over the mountains and through the Coromandel forest to get to the other side of the peninsula. After some rain early on by mid morning the sun was out as we stopped at the beautiful Hahei beach and then had a lovel...