We had a choppy late crossing over to the South Island onboard the Interislander which really smelt of wee! We found out later its because of all the livestock that are transported over - poooo. There was something wrong with the boat when we arrived in Picton and they couldn't open the doors so we just sat there for ages, finally disembarking at gone 10pm. The following day we met up with my great auntie pam we had visited back in 2008 with great uncle colin wh...

After Whakatane we had a day in Taupo and then drove to the Tongariro national park. We had been here on our last trip but this time we wanted to walk the Tongariro Alpine crossing, last time we only had flip flops which is no good. The walk is 19kms and takes around 6-8 hours, you climb for half of it so you need good shoes and a warm coat. So we got up fairly early and got a shuttle bus at 7am to go to the beginning of the walk. It was so cold that there was fr...

After a night in Orewa north of Auckland we drove down to the Coromandel area on the east coast. One of Kams lovely work friends Anna let us stay in their great bach in Onemana for a few nights, it was huge with about 5 bedrooms. It was valentines day too so we had a lovely evening with some beersies and proper meat for dinner. As we had been to the Coromandel before we wanted to explore what we hadn't seen yet so we decided to drive to the most northern tip of t...

We were actually a lot more settled in Auckland than we thought and it was quite sad to leave. On our last day of work we went up the skytower and we both didn't say a word to eachother - just stared out over the city and thought of all the memories from the last six months. We could see Ponsonby where we lived most of the time, the crane at the bottom of the road, the route we walked to work, our offices, our church, the lovely house we looked after in Remuera a...

So we arrived in Auckland in mid – July, in the depths of the Kiwi winter and it was colder than we thought it would be, not England cold but cold enough for heating! We had pre-booked a hostel in an area called Ponsonby which is just a 20 minute walk from the city centre. The hostel was called the Red Monkey and our first plan was just to stay there for a few weeks before looking for a house share somewhere else. We really liked the hostel though, it was quite...