From Gisborne we drove South down the coast along Hawke Bay to Napier.Napier suffered from a disastrous Earthquake in 1931 that flattened the town.As the town was rebuilt in the early thirties, the buildings are predominantly Art Deco.The guide books say that the Architects went to town with the Art Deco style. I was a little disappointed, there were obviously a lot of Art Deco buildings but quantity doesn't give quality, with the exception of the National Tobacc...

After the mountain biking we drove up to Gisborne, which is on the North East Coast of the North Island and is the first City in the world to see the sun rise.We have been doing a lot of the driving during the evening rather than going to the pub or watching a DVD in the van, as you get to maximize the stuff you do during the day. The drive took us longer than expected, so we arrived fairly late.We made a drastically poor assumption that the sun would rise off t...

As the weather was still crap, we decided to drive back to Rotorua to do some of the things we missed whilst we were there for Katherine's birthday.If your geography is any cop, you'll realise that this is a bit of a ping pong maneuver.But Niall had found out that, this is where the girls from Cathedral Cove were going to be and it also has a better night life than Whitianga.The Mounting Biking is also second to none so I wasn't going to argue.After a five hour d...

Road 309 is well renouned as a fantastic driver's road from the Coromandels to Whitianga, despite being in a poor man's Winnebago I still wanted to drive it.I'd been driving for about 10km when I stumbled across a small holding, there were little piglets running around all over the road, I had to slow to walking pace as more and more came out to greet me, they were very cute, is it wrong that all I could think of was bacon sandwiches? The weather was fantastic ...

The drive up to the Coromandal Peninsular was much the same at the drive up to Cape Reinga except there was less rain, steeper cliffs and windier roads. This time I was being even more careful as the hire company had strictly forbidden me to drive this 50km section of road!I'm glad I did, it was an exhausting third gear max drive but the scenery was absolutely breathtaking. And I felt as if I deserved the local Mussels which I had for dinner, and lunch, and I may...