So after a horribly early wake up call we headed down to the ferry terminal in Wellington and boarded, luckily it was a gorgeous blue-skied day, so the views from the 3.5 hour ferry crossing were stunning! It was a very rough journey though and I had to take some sea-sickness tablets, it crosses the notorious Cook Straight which is where the Pacific Ocean crashes in to the Tasman Sea. The end of the crossing was the most beautiful part, travelling through the Mar...

We arrived in Wellington at about 4pmish on 7th June and just did the usual supermarket rounds, nothing too interesting. My German friend Diddi and I cooked a delicious lasagne (thankyou Nanny for teaching me - I've never forgotten how and my friend wanted the recipe!). After that we just chilled for a bit, then headed for a night out on the town, which was eventful to say the least! It was a great night because it was the last night that our North Island group w...

About three hours south of Taupo is a little out-in-the-sticks lodge called River Valley. We were just here overnight as we were meant to go white water rafting this morning. Unfortunately the river was over 4 times higher than the safe cut-off point for rafting! It would have been fun, but it would have been too dangerous so we couldn't. So instead, we jumped in the shallow part of the river which was FREEZING, then jumped in the hot tub for an hour, which was a...

Luckily the bus didn't leave until 9.30am from Waitomo so I got a bit of a lie in which was nice as we went out and had a bit of a late night! We travelled down to Taupo which took a couple of hours, and went on a quick walk to a waterfall called Huka Falls. It was absolutely beautiful, extremely blue and very very strong! Apparently 200,000 litres of water falls every second, and every 3 seconds falls enough water to fill an olympic swimming pool! It was stunnin...

We woke up early on Tuesday morning and headed over to Mercury Bay on the north eastern peninsula. It was a pretty rubbish day and we couldn't really see anything so we couldn't make hot pools in the sand on hot water beach and we pretty much just went over to our hostel and had a bit of a dvd day. This being the case, we decided we weren't going to let the rain dampen our spirits and some of us swam and paddled anyway, including me! Despite the rain, it was a bi...