Today we made an early(ish) start and were on the road by 9am. We were heading to Gisborne but our immediate priority was to get petrol as we were very low! Fortunately there was a gas station in the next town, about 20km away...but unfortunately it was about 30c a litre more expensive than usual!

We arrived in Gisborne at about 10:30 and parked up near to the Tairawhiti museum. There was a Saturday morning farmers market on in the car park near the museum so we had a look around, sampled some fruit and bought ourselves a mid-morning snack from a bakery stall. We paid $5 each to look around the museum which included a recreation of a big ship, 'The Star of Canada', that had sunk off the coast nearby. We then walked towards the main shopping area. As we were walking along, we heard singing, so followed the sound and came across a group of children doing a Maori performance. They sang, danced, and the boys performed a convincing Haka, and others made great scary faces!

Further up the road we found the library which had free wifi, so we made the most of that for about half an hour before it closed. We spent about an hour or so looking in some of the shops, including a bookshop which was closing down and selling off its $50,000 worth of stock for $1 a book - but we didn't find anything we wanted!

We returned to the van and then drove to see the Captain Cook monuments around the city. At the top of a nearby hill was a lookout point where there was a statue of Cook. It was put there to commemorate one of the anniversaries of his landing there, but the designers made a mistake and the statue actually looks nothing like Captain Cook (for a start, his uniform is completely wrong!). Don't know how they managed to mess it up so much, but they did! So they built another statue of him at the bottom of the hill, close to our campsite for the night, which was much more of a likeness! Also here was a statue of Young Nick, the cabin boy on the Endeavour who first sighted land at Gisborne.

For our campsite, we decided to splash out and stay at the Top 10 Holiday Park ($42, about 22 pounds!) near the beach. They are expensive but they're the best! After parking up on the grass we walked to the beach and lay on the grass in the sun, fantasising about living in one of the beachfront house there! That night we discovered that our power cable was well and truly broken (lots of smoke and an electric shock!) so we'd have to call the company the next day - oops! We spent quite a cold night in the van with no heater - brr!