The drive from Taupo to Wellington was going to a long one - 380km of road with a "technical" speed limit of 100km at most and suggested driving time of 5 and a half hours excluding stops for lunch or food. Well these things don't really take into account Lucy's driving and penchant for speeding and we did it in about 5 hours including a 30/40 minute stop for lunch in Bulls. Lunch was actually very tasty sweet potato wedges with sour cream and chilli sa...

On arrival to Taupo we had a little difficulty in locating our hostel on account of not being entirely sure on what street our hostel was actually located, being fairly sure it was on a road that began with a K. After driving down a number of roads beginning with a K and being no closer to finding our hostel we parked, got out the car, went to Base and went on the internet to look it up. Turned out it was like 500m away. Whilst we were on the internet Lucy printe...

Now you may remember me mentioning in a previous blog how we had calculated the costs involved in getting the bus and in hiring a car which was our preferred option as it was far more flexible and not preventing us from visiting the Waitomo Caves (which Intercity's crappy service for all intents and purposes was doing) and found the bus to be significantly cheaper. This significant difference in cost was down largely to the fact that the cost involved in taking t...

Rotorua is a place known best for its geothermal activity with a number of geysers and hot mud pools located across the city, and it is for this reason the city is also renowned for its unique sulphur smell (the result of the geysers releasing hydrogen suphide) into the atmosphere. But we were there for none of that (well we would take a look at the geysers) - we were there for zorbing and luging!Once off the bus from Auckland via Hamilton we quickly navigated ou...

BAY OF ISLANDSThe bus for Paihia (in the Bay of Islands) was leaving at 8:30am so we were up early that morning to catch it. The bus station was just up the road at Skycity with the SkyTower where we'd been the night before. But when we arrived there wasn't an InterCity bus to Paihia to be found. There was a Northliner bus to somewhere that stopped at Paihia on route, was that the same? I went to the ticket office to ask and got a surly b**** of a woman who said ...