Dear Reem, Simon and Aria

Thank you for buying us our beachside accommodation. We have just spent three days up on the Coromandel in the North of New Zealand in a hostel appropriately named 'On The Beach' and it was really good fun.

However, it didn't start so well. We turned up at the first hostel we had booked and they had forgotten our booking and had no space. They tried to appease us by sending us to their friend's homestay, run by a lovely old women called Pat. Staying with Pat did feel a bit like you were gatecrashing an eccentric old aunt's house, complete with her pet eels in the river at the bottom of her garden. If you so desired, you could feed the pet eels. I did. Donna didn't.

By a majority vote of two to zero, we decided to not stay another night with Pat and so moved to the more normal 'On The Beach'.

On the way, we decided to stop off and go for a ride in a little train owned by another eccentric (the Coromandel is quite full of them). This was built by an old hippie alcoholic sculptor who originally built a little train on his property to transport the clay from the top of the hill to his workshops. He was more successful at building a railway than making sculptures because a few years ago, the bank told him that he needed to start giving train rides to the public because, if he relied on selling his sculptures, he would go bankrupt.

The train ride itself was quite pretty as it wound its way through lots of native forests up to the top of the hill with spectacular views over the bay. At some point in my life, possibly when I turned 37 two days ago because I never noticed it before, I have reached the point when I have started to appreciate trees. There were lots of different varieties and they were all really cool. Is that a bad thing?

We were meant to only spend 10 minutes at the top before going back down again but due to another train breaking down we were stuck up there for almost an hour. When the rains came in obliterating the lovely view there was nothing to do but talk to our fellow train riders. Luckily, after 3 months away we are well equipped to talk to anyone..well, almost.

Our first attempt at conversation was with someone from Stoke-on-Trent. Luckily, Donna went to university there so she could spend hours talking about the qualities of Stoke. Well, she managed a minute anyway. Moving swiftly onwards to our next target; a kindly looking old woman who used to live in Brighton. We thought things were looking up until she casually mentioned she thought that both Brighton and Eastbourne had gone downhill a lot recently since all those foreign immigrants had moved in and spent all their time down the beach, intimidating good white folk. We spent the rest of the hour enjoying the rain and avoiding everyone else.

On to 'On The Beach' and our social skills didn't improve when we made the old schoolboy error of getting a bit tipsy with some sober people. This has the distinct disadvantage that they are sober which means that they can remember everything you say. We tend to like talking about our toilet habits a lot when we are drunk. I am not sure they appreciated it.

I suppose informing random strangers about how you like to go to the toilet might be bad but as social faux pas goes, it is not as bad as eating boiled cabbage every night like the two young germans in our room decided to do. Nothing offends fellow backpackers quite as much as making them feel like they are in an Oliver Twist Poorhouse.

Coromandel's most famous tourist attraction is it's Hot Water Beach. This is a beach where at certain times of the day you can dig a hole and it will fill up with hot water from the volcanic activity going on underneath. This unusual phenomenon is unique in the world and attracts literally hundreds of tourists every day. It was slightly let down because

a. It was boiling hot the day we went and no one really wants to sit in a hot pool when you are sweating like a fat girl in a cake shop with no money (good one Chloe)

b. with modern technology you can stay at home and have a bath which requires far less effort than having to dig a big hole with the children's plastic bucket and spade that Donna bought me for my birthday

c. there was too big a surf the day we went which meant that there wasn't any hot water anyway. So we just spent a morning digging a big hole in a beach along with lots of other people.

But hey, we had fun. Mostly thanks to the toy bucket and spade meaning that we could turn our hole into a sandcastle with lots of turrets, until the sea came in and knocked it all down. Also, the giant surf was brilliant for going into the sea and trying not to drown. Note to self: big waves are really good for jumping around in but not so good when you are trying to go for your customary wee in the sea. You wade into a good depth, you wait until there are no big waves to distract you and release...just as the tide goes out. You are left standing there with wee going down your leg, effectively pissing yourself in front of lots of holidaymakers.

A lovely day was a little bit spoilt in the afternoon when we went and played crazy golf. We invited our new American friend Sarah along to play, mostly based on the fact that she had supposedly only ever played the game once before so we thought we could beat her. We got well and truly hustled. Never mind, it is the taking part that counts. But I have learnt my lesson and next time will not invite anyone else and only play with Donna because I know I can beat her.

Lots of love

Jim and Donna

INTERESTING KIWI FACT OF THE DAY

New Zealand comes out as the worst country in the world in the Donjim Scale For Crap Insect Allowance. This is a scale that basically forgives a country for having rubbish insects like mosquitoes and sandflies if there is corresponding good weather to back it up. For example, when you go to Thailand or Bali, you are more than happy to put up with a few mosquito bites because you can sit out in your bikini every day and get a good tan. New Zealand, despite having the fourth worst weather in the world, has got some of the worst crap insects in the world which take great pleasure in biting, stinging and generally attacking us a lot (which makes it really unfair).