Up and away at 8am to make our way over to the west coast, to a surf place called Raglan. We made it to our cool backpackers camp at around 2pm, which is about a 15 minute drive outside of Raglan centre. It's sort of set on the side of a bit of a hill in a woodland area and has a view of the sea. Although, it's still a 10 minute car journey from here to the beach. We got a four-bed cabin to share again and the rooms were a bit more spacious than last nights. We...

So we were up and ready at 8am for our bus out of Auckland to Hahei. The bus was 30 minutes late though and they turned up in a huge hired coach! Apparently they are really busy at the moment as it's peak summer time. Usually Stray have nice smaller buses. Then we were a bit annoyed because we didn't make a stop at Mt Eden as the bus wouldn't make it. Anyway, we made our way to Hahei across the Corumandel mountain range. Lovely scenery on the windy roads. We mad...

We were booked on a Free day tour around Auckland with Stray for today. The big old bus, which runs on used vegetable oil, picked us up at about 10am and we went to our first stop, the Sky Tower. There were about 35 of us on the tour, and the guide, called Chucky, got us to stand in a big circle to play a game of heads or tales. We had to make our choice by holding our bum for tales or head for...you guessed it, heads. He flipped a coin and whoever chose correctl...

Well, the weather was the same again - wet! We had to be up and checked out by 10 though, so couldn't even just lay in bed. We've got a bus out of here at 4pm back to Auckland. For the rest of the day we did nothing exciting. We've not had an Internet connection for a couple of days so we went to an Internet cafe to check up on emails, Facebook, Skype etc plus uploaded all our latest photos to Facebook. There were pretty bad driving rains today. Oh, guess what ...

Slept really well because I'd had a few pints last night. Checked out. Didn't rush around because of the weather. It was that really light rain that gets you soaking wet without you properly realising. We went for breakfast and ended up watching Yes Man in the communal tv room which somebody had just put on. Busy in there as well with the weather like it was. That's a really funny film - watch it asap if you haven't already. One of Jim Carey's best, I think. At...