Blazing heat, beautiful hot sunshine, wearing nothing but shorts and t-shirts, ahhh....oh no, that's you lot back home! Freezing cold, rain, icy winds, wearing all clothes we own at once...that's more like it! Yes, the 1st June officially marked the start of winter here in New Zealand! Fortunately we are still located in Auckland which has the mildest weather conditions in New Zealand, most places 100km south of Auckland are covered in snow!

Well now, since our last update, we are both still working, me at a private hospital and Chris in Audit which is proving to be great experience! Our contracts run until the end of June here in Auckland and after this we are thinking about moving to another city in New Zealand to work, just to try something new, but haven't decided quite where yet!

We have continued our North Island explorations at the weekends and last weekend (which was a bank holiday for us here) we donned our wetsuits in freezing temperatures (a touch different to when we last put a wetsuit on just off the Great Barrier Reef!) and decided to leap into the icy cold waters of Waitomo Caves and engage in a spot of Black Water Rafting! It was amazing! Very very different to white water rafting. Basically you put on your wetsuit, cave boots, helmet, and head light and are driven to a cave (which appears at first sight to be a rather small insignificant hole in a rock), where you collect a rubber ring and clamber your way into the hole, before continuing to navigate your way through varying sizes of tunnels until you reach the underground waterways. We then leapt into our rings and floated along through a mixture of huge caverns and very very low rocks that you could just fit under when laying flat out on your ring looking up with your nose a centre mitre from the rock (marginally scary - but soon realised we're not as claustrophobic as first thought)! There were also 3 waterfalls to negotiate which, well, basically involved standing at the top of said waterfalls, turning round, wedging your tube onto your bum and leaping backwards into the black waters below! Excellent! As well as amazing fun, near the end of the trip our guides told us to turn are lights off so we were in total pitch blackness (as opposed to the dimly lit glow of our torch light) and float along following the trail of lights from the beautiful glowworm studded ceilings until we reached daylight (photos to follow).

As well as this, we also saw some very strange sites in Waitomo which is a very very small town about 4 hours south west of Auckland! On our first day in Waitomo we attended a rabbit shearing! Yes, rabbit shearing - apparently in Waitomo they breed Angora rabbits which need shearing on a regular basis in order to survive! They then make various forms of clothing out of their fur! The actual shearing process is bizarre and basically involves putting the bunnies on a stand, tieing all 4 paws to it so they are stretched out and then twizzeling them round in a rotisserie fashion while the lady shaves there fur off! Although the process looks rather odd/cruel, the rabbits actually seem to really enjoy it and aren't distressed at all (which was a relief). They look decidedly skinnier afterwards but apparently have lots more energy due to being a whole lot lighter! Bizzarre! We also did lots of walking while we were there, exploring caves and ate some of the most amazing chocolate sludge cake we've ever tasted! yum!