We landed in Auckland International at around midday on Sunday and my bag managed to find itself on to the next carousel which took me about half an hour to realise. For New Zealand I had a bus pass for a company called Kiwi Experience. Our ticket would take us to almost all of the country apart from the very south and the east coasts. We caught the free shuttle bus directly to our first hostel in the centre of Auckland, checked in and went for a wander around the city. I also went to an internet cafe to look at some of my pictures but the computer I used decided to properly mess up my picture card so I couldn't view the pictures, nor take any new ones! Thought I'd lost all my photos so I started to feel a bit sick.


The next day I went straight to the Post Office to pick up my debit card that mother dearest had sent from England to replace the one I lost in LA. Had a bit of a look round Auckland today, went to an 'authentic' London pub (there were a few of these around) which sold ales in a non-authentic cold way.

Tuesday we headed North up to a town called Paihia, a 5 hour drive from Auckland to a region called the Bay of Islands. Paihia was quite a sleepy seaside town. Me and Joe hired bikes and rode up to the golf course for a round of 18.

Wednesday we were up early for a trip to the northern-most point of the country called Cape Reinga. Our driver was called Auto (not his Christian name, I presume) and was pretty crackers but good fun. He used to do the full country tours for Kiwi Experience so he had lots of stories for us about the sort of things that happen on the buses. We got to the cape at about midday and walked to the lighthouse. It was apparently unseasonably bad weather, very windy and grey but not wet. Out into the sea you could see the Pacific Ocean and the Tasmanian Sea both battling against each other. The next drive was on to the giant sand dunes for a spot of sand boarding. Bare in mind that it was ridiculously windy, we had to climb up an 85m high sand dune with the sand being whipped up into your face and lungs. I was one of the first to ride back down on the body board, so I went down the first route which had a massive bump at the end causing me to flip off and just roll down the last part. The next drive was to 90-mile beach to see if we could drive along it on the way back to Paihia but the tide was about 2 metres higher than usual so it was a no go. The next leg was back to Paihia with a stop on the way for fish n chips (or fush n chups if you're a kiwi). Thursday was our last day in Paihia which I spent mainly sitting around and playing basketball due to a stinking hangover. The bus picked us up around 3 and we got back to Auckland for 7pm and spent one more night in Auckland.

The next couple of days involved a drive to Mercury Bay via Cathedral Cove and one night in a little town called Whitianga then on to tourist hotspot Rotorua. Rotorua literally stinks. All the geothermal activity means the whole place smells of eggs. After checking in to our hostel me and most of the other people on the bus went up to a nearby luge track for a bit of a downhill race on these kind of self-propelled go-kart things. The night in Rotorua was taken up by a trip to the Tamaki cultural reserve which involved an original Mauri greeting, a tour around the reserve and an authentic Mauri meal cooked in the ground. It was fairly interesting but was quite worth NZ$75.

The next stop was Waitomo, a town buit on top of a bunch of caves. On the way to Waitomo I think we stopped at a town that since the Lord of the Rings had been renamed Hobbiton. Basically it just had a hideous statue of Gollum in the middle of one of the main roads. Waitomo was a lot of fun as we decided to go black water rafting in the caves. It was pretty expensive at NZ$200 but well worth it. We abseiled down a hole, did a zipline in the dark, had to drag ourselves along floating in a tyre innertube, climb up and down waterfalls and through a bunch of holes - all the while wearing an ill fitting wetsuit.

Taupo was our next destination where we would spend two nights so we had a free day to do a bit more than usual. For our free day we booked on to a bus to visit the Tongariro National Park to do a one-day walk across the mountains. The walk was amazing and scenery was brilliant. Bizarrly it got more demanding towards the end where it was all downhill. We walked for about 8 hours that day covering about 21km - probably more than I'd do in a month back home! It's safe to say I slept soundly that night.

The next few days weren't too eventful, mainly we were just travelling all the time, firstly to a resort called River Valley which was set in some very green hills in the middle of nowhere and the next day was spent on the bus to the capital city and gateway to the south inslad, Wellington. We arrived in Wellington on Thursday and decided to head off to the South on Friday so we didn't get to see an awful lot of Wellington. What we did see was very cold and windy.