We arrived in Auckland late afternoon on Thursday. We are staying at Albert Park Backpackers. We found a voucher from an info station in Rotorua, so we had one free night there. As an added bonus, there were not enough keys for a 12 bed dorm so for the first two we had a twin room. On Friday we walked almost to the harbour bridge to book my bridge climb, but it was ages away so I did it on the net instead. We also had a Subway sandwich (I'm obsessed with the Ch...

We arrived in Rotorua on Sunday 10th. We had an early bus so we arrived at lunchtime. We stayed at Crash Palace Backpackers, which was awesome..though the staff were a bit mean at times! We didn't really do alot for the rest of the day. We went to Pak n Save and then watched White Chicks. Monday we walked around Kuirau Park. As Rotorua was built on the site of a volcano, the park was full of geothermal activity, such as hot mudpools and steam coming out of the g...

We arrived in Napier on Thursday evening. Found our hostel. It was called Toad Hall, and as you guess the theme was the Wind in the Willows. It was a nice hostel but there wasn't many people around and it was freezing cold. However we did have free internet and washing. Friday we split up and each did our own thing. I went to the museum, to learn about the earthquakes (I'm a bit obsessed) and had a wander round the town. Napier was destroyed in an earthquake in...

We got the Interislander ferry over from Picton. It took three hours and was really boring. We arrived and got a free shuttle to the train station, then decided to walk to our hostel . This was a bad plan as it was a lot further away than we thought. We eventually arrived at the Cambridge Hotel and it was really nice. It's like a hotel and the showers are really fancy. It was cheap too. We didn't do alot that day, just food shopping and the internet.The n...

We got the bus back to Christchurch on Sat 2nd, spent the night there. Didn't do alot much though as the next day we left at 7am to go to Picton. We arrived at Picton at 12.15pm and checked into out hostel, Atlantis Backpackers, which was a really good hostel and had lots of space and free breakfast. Picton is a really small port so there wasn't a lot to do,we played mini golf and then hung around the hostel. We had dinner at the Toot and Whistle Inn, which was ...