we left Rotorua a few days ago and headed to Taupo where we stayed in a hostel called Urban Retreat. after arriving on 13th we decided Valentines day was going to be adrenaline filled! we got up early and booked a skydive each and ru also booked a bungy jump, we headed out to the bungy and ru started looking a bit pale! she was jumping a 47m bungy into water. with no hesitation she jumped stright off the platform and was dunked headfirst intot he lake down to her knees! after this we had about 5 mins before heading off to freefall the sky diving place. after watching a dvd and signing our lives away we got into our overalls and harnesses and headed out to our pink plane! we were both pretty scared and as we got higher and higher we had to put on oxygen masks! we saw the other person who was jumping form our plane jump at 12,000 feet, he disappeared then we continued to 15,000 feet!!! scary! ru jumped first then straight after celia jumped it was a bit of a cloudy day so we had to jump into a white cloud which was actually quite cool, once we broke through the cloud the view was amaing with lake taupo directly underneath us, the freefall was over a minute long and nothing like either of us has felt before. then the parachute opened and we had a gentle decent. we have it all on dvd so we will show you when we get home!

the next day we headed to wellington to get the ferry over to the south island, we managed to get on a ferry that evening and arrived in Picton around 12.30 the following morning, after getting some sleep we headed down to Kaikoura where we booked a whale watching trip for the following day. the whale watching trip was really cool and we saw 2 different sperm whales and about 200 dusky dolphins which were really playful jumping out of the water and swimming along with the boat.

after the trip we drove down to Queenstown where we managed to sneak our way into a campsite by following a car through the barrier before it closed on us - fun, but a little bit stupid as our roof isn't insured!! we made it through and the following morning booked in for the next 3 nights, queenstown was really nice and we enjoyed lazing around in the sun and eating ice cream, we mainly sunbathed as we are getting short on cash and the weather was gorgeous (around 33 degrees c!) on the last night we treated ourselves and went on a pub crawl of queenstown organised by big night out, they took us to all the bars and gave us drinks vouchers and discounts and it was a really good night.

the following day we drove to Christchurch where we stayed in a campsite which was virtually a car park! then today we dropped our van back as we fly out of here on sunday! after dropping the van and taking 2 journeys to the petrol station due to the stupid woman insisting it wasn't full when it was, we had a late lunch and came online, tomorrow we are going to see some real live kiwis!!! yay and some seahorse feeding, after that we will get sorted and ready to arrive at the airport at 4.30am!

hope you are all well

xxxx