We've made it to the South Island. The last few days have been pretty grey and rather rainy at times, but we had plenty of fun. After our first evening in Napier, we had a long lie and a late breakfast, then hung around the campsite until it was time for our wine tour. We were picked up by Vince, our charismatic local wine-lover, in his minibus and met the only other attendee on the tour, Chloe, a girl from South Korea who lived and worked in Auckland but was on ...

On Monday we set off from our campsite south of Auckland to the Coromandel Peninsula to the east. The roads from Auckland took us through lovely green farmland before we eventually reached the town of Thames and started heading north, up the western side of the peninsula.From here, the road took a narrow, winding path between steep rock walls to our right and rocky shores on our left. The winding road, as well as the view across the water to the the land on our w...

After our short and pleasant flight from Nadi, we arrived in a rainy and cool Auckland on Thursday, grabbed our bags and caught the shuttle bus to Queen's Road in downtown Auckland, where our BASE hostel was located.After getting settled in our room, we stuck on our huge load of laundry, accumulated over our week in Fiji, and headed to the Globe Bar downstairs from the hostel, after hearing an announcement about free pizza.After a couple of Tui beers we finally ...

What a week we've had in Paradise AKA Fiji!We got into Nadi airport on the main Fijian island of Viti Levu last Thursday after our 10+ hour flight from LA, which saw us losing the 1st of June thanks to crossing the international dateline as well as having to deal with creepy crawlies getting in our shoes among other places. Despite this, the flight actually passed relatively quickly and comfortably, though the breakfast left something to be desired i.e. edible fo...

Following our night in Needles, we got up and set off in the morning, back west through the Mojave Desert in California. What should have been a boring drive was one of my favourites of the trip, as we sped along straight roads undulating across the desert plains with good music playing, passing railway tracks with names written in stones on the embankments and surrounded by the ever-present mountains.After a couple of hours of driving we reached the town of Twen...