Thanks for your birthday messages....I've been writing a diary for the last few days... Saturday The last day of our bus tour was pretty unsuccessful. We went to Tongariro national park where we were really excited about walking a famous path called the Tongariro crossing. It is supposed to be one if the most beautiful one day hikes in the world but when we got there it was cancelled due to the horrendous weather. We spent an afternoon there watching the r...

Hello from day 4 of our tour! It's been a busy last few days. On Saturday morning we climbed on the bus and first headed up to the top of Mount Eden where we would have had a fabulous view over the whole of Auckland if it had not been all foggy and rainy! We then headed out of town for 3 hours to Hahei where first we went to the hot water beach. Our guide told us that we could dig a hole in the middle of the sand that would then fill up with warm water. He didn't...

Kia ora from New Zealand! Well the flight wasn't as horrendous as expected. We watched a couple of films then got our heads down and before we knew it 14 hours had passed and we were landing at 4am Auckland time. We got an eyewateringly expensive taxi to our hostel and then went to sleep in the tv room! When we resurfaced we wandered out onto the streets. Outside our hostel we were propositioned by a lady from TV1 news. They were doing a piece on backpackers and...