We woke up pretty early and got on the road for just after sunrise about 8.00am. We chose a route which was a little out of the way but it paid off for the views. The morning started very misty everywhere but soon burned off, the days have been around 16c and it’s winter! The sun is very warm but nights and first thing in the morning are really cold. We had read on our phones in the news that there had been an earthquake in New Zealand but in Wellington. We had...

Seen as we were at a place where we had paid to stay the night, we didn’t rush off. We got some washing done and water filled etc. We then set off for north of Auckland. Our first stop along the way was Mangawhai Heads, the views were nice. We got out and had a walk on a lookout track for over the heads, we had to walk up a wooden spiral staircase to get to the view, beautiful. Further along the drive the views got better, we had pretty much followed the Twin C...

We were up early and ready for the beach this morning, we drove the ten minutes down the road. We parked, got our things together then walked to rent a spade to dig our own hot water pool. We walked down onto the beach not knowing what to expect. There was a patch where there seemed to be a lot of activity and a lot more steam. We headed for there, as we walked up there we saw groups of people sat in their pools they had dug out of the sand with water in the bott...

We woke up to it being so quiet this morning apart from the birds we could hear outside. We are going to stay for a while because we need to get ourselves organised, it’s now less than a week before we fly to America and we’re not ready for it. We had breakfast and sat at the table organising. We now know what we’re going to do with our last week here and how much we think we can get done. We have also started looking at car rentals to get us from San Franc...

Rotorua is in a thermal activity zone, there’s tonnes of it here, that’s why the whole place smells permanently of bad eggs (sulphur). We didn’t get up too early as I’d slept crap due to my cold, it’s definitely got worse. We set off around 10.00am to Kuiria Park where you can walk around thermal activity for free. We found it, parked up and took a walk, we definitely knew we’d found it due to all of the steam coming off the park, even the drains stea...