We arrived at the hotel..yes a hotel now not hostels and found a sleeping Kate!! We settled in and headed out for dinner...yes we are eating in restaurants now as well..not cooking for ourseleves..we truely are on holiday in paradise. Unfortunately we have a very early start (6am) on the first day of our holiday! We board a ferry and set off on our journey to our first island..we thought this journey was about 20 minutes...now 5 hours later we arrive at our firs...

As soon as we arrive in Aukland, there's no time for stopping, as Kate, Kim, Panda, and Jo begin there road trip up to the bay of islands.We arrive at the car centre to pick up the car (named vera) and we are suprised to see that the balance for the car is already paid!(we only paid a 10% deposit). so we pay $36 for insurance and off we go feeling very smug at how cheap our trip is!Panda, kate and Kim take it in turns to drive, which was a very easy drive as ther...

We get on the bus to taupo, nearly leaving kim and kate behind thanks to oversleeping! The day was lovely and sunny so we spent the afternoon lying on the grass in the sun chatting away. We had a lovely dinner of fajitas-yum yum, and have a few drinks at the hostel. we move onto another bar to find our bus driver-kane, who drove us around the south island. None of us ever thought we'd see him again so we all got very excited and the drinks started to flow properl...

We arrive in Windy wellington after a 3-4 hour rocky, ferry journey (puke!) and check into our hostel (upgraded again!). We are still with our friends, Charlotte and Sophie, and we meet up with Tony aswell, another one of our little family! Our night was strange as its easter weekend, and the opening ours were very funny!we went for a few drinks in the hostel bar, then had to get kicked out and come back in in ten minutes because of the easter opening hours!very ...

With a very hungover Panda in tow, we finally made it to Christchurch after the longest journey yet in New zealand. As we'd already spent a week in christchurch, we decided to do nothing for a couple of days to save the pennies and rest our poor, poor livers!So our days here were spent lounging around watching films, reading and sleeping. One day we surfaced and dragged ourselves to the botanical gardens, which was very beautiful, but cold so we ended up in a mus...