Auckland is a very busy city and nothing like the rest of New Zealand! We stayed at a camp site on the outskirts of Auckland and suddenly we had four lanes of traffic which was a shock for us as we had been used to driving on single lanes for the last month! We chickened out of city driving and opted to take the bus into the city. When we arrived we started to explore but unfortunately it started to rain heavily. Because we haven't had access to wifi to check t...

Having had a lovely day at the beach yesterday we chose to again spend another day at the beach, this time at Cathedral Cove. It was around a 30 minute walk over the headland to the beach but the beach was worth the steep climb. Golden sandy beach, still turquoise blue water and interesting rock formations made it feel like we were back in Thailand, and it was nearly just as hot! We spent the day swimming and sunbathing before heading on the road again. We spen...

From Waitomo we headed to the Coromandel Peninsula and firstly visited Hot Water Beach which is one of the top ten beaches to visit in the world. As the name suggests this beach has hot water. At low tide you go down to the beach and dig yourself a hole which then naturally fills with hot water. The water is heated to 64oc by hot rock below which was heated when the area was last volcanically active which was 5-9 million years ago and it still has a temperature o...

Waitomo was only a couple of hours from Rotorua and we arrived in lovely sunshine so we spent the afternoon enjoying the pool at our camp site as the village itself is made up of a shop, pub and a visitor centre so there wasn't much else we could do. The next morning we went on a caving trip with four other Brits and our guide Rebecca. After donning some lovely wet suits and wellies we abseiled down 27 metres into the cave where we then waded through icy cold wa...

We had a lovely leisurely morning and took advantage of the midday checkout at our camp site. After having a short walk around Taupo we drove to Huka falls which is where you can see a river being squeezed through a small creek causing huge rapids. Also near Huka falls we visited the Huka Honey Hive where we saw honey being made and we even got to taste some :) Our next place to visit was Rotorua and after a short drive we started to explore this thermally activ...