Dear Amy and Nick

As we had a couple of days on our hands thanks to the aborted canoeing trip, we decided to make our way down to New Plymouth, a quaint little town harbouring delusions of grandeur by calling itself a city, nestled between the slopes of Mount Taranaki, an active volcano, and the Tasman Sea.

Due to the rushed nature of our decision to come here and a perverse desire to go camping, we have ended up in a rather splendid campsite just outside of town; a campsite that boasts the best toilet/kitchen facilities that Donna has yet seen on our travels. I note that it is the best that Donna has seen, it is probably also the best that I have seen as well yet I am far less inclined to make such an observation.

And, while sitting out in the little camp chairs we bought from Warehouse for $8 enjoying a plastic glass of wine while the sun sets in rich varieties of orange and purple over Sugarloaf Islands or cooking the best homemade pasta dish we have yet managed on our travels in their plush kitchen facilities, or curled up in our new sleeping bags (also from Warehouse) in the cosy little tent that Donna's friend Camilla kindly lent us watching a movie, we cannot help feeling that our perverse desire to go camping was a good one. That opinion will change very quickly obviously if it starts raining at any point. We don't want to admit it to any Kiwi people yet because they will look at us horrified but we still don't own any raincoat/umbrella paraphernalia to protect us from the elements, preferring to wing it.

So to get from the canoeing lodge in Tamunura to here we had to traverse a stretch of New Zealand highway, poetically named the 'Forgotten Highway'. I am not sure who has forgotten it because there are lots of brochures and maps in every Information Centre telling you all about it but still it was a very nice drive, full of lots of beautiful things to see and some lovely things to do.

I think the highlight for me was our successful reorganisation of Sunny the Car into a more logical and easy to comprehend system of packing. This has allowed us to be able to have a picnic on the go in record time. In fact, when we stopped for lunch on Strathmore Saddle with its views overlooking Mount Taranaki and the central plateau (according to the brochure), we managed to unpack the sandwich materials, make the sandwiches, eat the sandwiches and pack away the sandwich material, before the German couple at the picnic table next to us had time to even say hello. I admire and strive for effective and efficient lunch making abilities so am pleased that this has rubbed off on Donna.

In an effort to 'not just drive around a lot but to actually stop and do things', we stopped at a pub along the way. This was a very famous and old and important pub and there were lots of tourists there. We had a pint but didn't work out why it was famous.

This new philosophy to do things has further taken root in us since we have been to New Plymouth. We made an effort to not just sit around at the campsite but to go into town with a mission to 'wander round town, go to a museum or something and go to a cafe'. Once again, the new efficient Donna and Jim managed to achieve all these things in about two hours which meant that pretty soon we could go back and relax by our tent, feeling like the day wasn't wasted. Although 'wander around town' did mean 'go to a shop and buy some new sunglasses' but it still counts.

We did go to Puke Ariki Museum, where we got to see a wonderful exhibition about the sun which involved lots of interactive stuff. It seemed to be only us and people with children there so it was very easy to bully the other patrons out of the way so we could press the buttons first on all the exhibits. We also went to the 'Best In Show', a small room exhibit dedicated to photographs of dogs. Although it was incredibly uninteresting, we still managed to spend a good half an hour there, Donna taking pictures of the pictures of dogs and me successfully completing the Scavenger hunt which meant I won a free badge. I am now proudly wearing it and will do until I lose it somewhere. This is possibly my single greatest achievement of our travels so far, only slightly let down by the fact that they didn't really check my answers so it would have been easy to cheat and that it was aimed more at the under 10 age group rather than over 35s.

We finished the stay in New Plymouth off with a visit to the Festival of Lights. This is in the big park in the centre of town which they have decorated with lots of lights to make the whole park look like a fairy grotto. They also had a little stage set up with a couple of bands playing, so we set up our little picnic and spent the evening, eating sandwiches, drinking wine and listening to a psychedelic jazz band with, shall we say, mixed talent. The perfect end to a good few days.

All our love

Jim and Donna

INTERESTING KIWI FACT OF THE DAY

New Zealand is one of the most remotest places in the whole world and is often cut of from the rest of civilisation for long periods of time. Scientists predict that if the whole of New Zealand disappeared then it is possible that the rest of the world wouldn't notice until the next All Blacks tour or Peter Jackson's latest film was due out.