Hey!!

Our last night in Melbourne was a really nice family meal along the riverside where we walked along the promenade admiring the city all lit up at night. The Crowne hotel has these giant fire explosions every hour so we watched in amazement as we could really feel the heat off them.

We left Melbourne, and said a very tearful goodbye to Vicki, Laura, Mark, Kelly, Ryan and Monty the dog to head of to Auckland on Sunday.

Once we arrived in Auckland and had a very stressful time trying to get the car hire sorted, we turned up at our hostel feeling rather shattered but relieved to just get some kip. We didn't realise it made us 13 hours ahead of you guys back home so it really threw us out!

On Monday, we got more and more stressed out as the day went on! it seemed to be a bit of a disaster when we couldn't find anywhere to park the car for free, no food that wasn't asian and getting caught in one-way systems was causing us serious grief. So we decided after 4 hours of getting stressed out, that we'd head to the marina and go across to Devonport by boat, where we had a picnic on top of a dorment volcano overlooking the very stressful city of Auckland and laughing at ourselves for getting so worked up! The views were stunning and certainly calmed us down. We headed off to the beach side of the volcano and chillaxed for a couple of hours...getting burnt as usual!

Tuesday we took the long 3.5 hour drive to Rotorua.....the drive itself was tiring but the scenery was fantastic. Once we arrived, we headed straight to Wai-O-Tapu to walk around the geothermal park to see boiling mud pools, geysers, colorful (but dangerous) pools of water and not forgetting the terrible smell! - the constant eggy kind of fart smell in Rotorua surrounded us wherever we went, it was hard to breathe at some points cos it smelt so bad! - although we were just blaming each other for some of it! In the evening, we visited a Polynesian Spa where we relaxed in hot pools of water (one was bright green!), all of which were around 38-42 degrees!!

On Wednesday, after getting a long night's sleep at the most comfy bed ever in a hostel, we went white water rafting down the Rangikito River. The first main bit of it had Becs terrified and her expression said it all! - she didn't look impressed! - The rest of it was a lot tamer but still great fun going through all the rapids and trying not to fall out. We visited the Green and Blue lakes afterwards for some food and to admire the views before heading back to Auckland for our last night. The scenic journey was absolutely amazing though and we couldn't help but bang out some tunes along the way.

We are now in Singapore, just hanging around before our taxi takes us to the airport and we should land in Heathrow around 5am - BA0012 if you want to check our details. - Dad I will call you when we get to Gatwick!!!

xoxoxo