Rotorua is the sort of place which you really should make time to go to. If nothing else, it will make you feel much better about your personal hygiene. No, it's not that all the locals smell, but the town is built around various sulphur pools which emit the classic 'rotten egg' smell of schoolboy stink bombs. The odour isn't constant or omnipresent. Much of the time you don't notice it at all. Then you turn a corner and it just hits you straight in the nost...

We packed up Blanche on Friday morning in Orewa and drove through the rain in Auckland and along the scenic coast route around the Hunua Ranges to our destination, the Coromandel Peninsula. We planned to spend several days travelling round. I had a few walks in mind after reading various brochures and looking on the internet - the Port Jackson coastal walk to Stony Bay in the far north of the peninsula, the cliff top walk from Hahei to Cathedral Cove, and the m...

Bad weather was setting in, so rather than linger in the north we headed once again for the internet haven of Takapuna Beach, in the Auckland suburbs. We also needed to find a decent electronics shop because the diminutive 40Gb hard drive on our laptop was almost full - thanks mainly to the 1,200 photos Katy has taken so far. After a bit of research, we identified the make/model of external hard drive we wanted and were gratified to find a cheap shop only a coup...

From Ahipara, we drove south and caught a ferry across to Rawene. We only stopped there to buy a bag of avocados, but it wasn't a bad little spot. Katy pointed out that it was a good example of how many small towns in the Northland area of the North Island have much more character than their counterparts in the South Island. They have buildings that aren't just functional rectangles with tin roofs - some are quite old and many have an attractive, decorative s...

I love beaches, so when we arrived at Ninety Mile Beach I was very excited. It's not exactly 90 miles, it's actually more like 60, but that's long enough for me. We were staying in Ahipara which is at the southern end of the beach. As soon as we'd checked into the campsite we headed straight off to the beach with my newly bought tennis ball in tow. The beach with the tide out was massive, even bigger than my expectations. Everywhere you looked was sand and ...