First day in New Zealand after our long flight, arrived at auckland airport at around 12 in the afternoon, to a welcome party of police clearly waiting for someone to get off the plane so they can nab them!

After making our way through biosecurity, lots of security guards and laboratories, we discover we will be collected by the van company, so after a long wait and a small macdonalds (much cheaper than the uk), we were collected in a minibus containing multiple old people. We collected the van after quite a substantial wait and after doing all the safety videos and working out deposits we came to the conclusion this van was not going to be easy to drive at all.

New Zealand is also quite difficult to navigate your way around just using a map because we dont know what anything is, so we just decided that a sat nav was going to be the easiest way to save time and even money. As I (lauren) was not particularly keen on driving the van especially as even josh was having difficulty driving it, and my map reading skills were definetly not the kind to rely on.

After working out how to drive the van along with thinking what the plan should be we headed for the north of Auckland to stay in a small campsite in a place called Takapuna.