hey hey! right, we left early early from Auckland, but typically the bus was about half and hour late, but we met some friends on the bus who we'd be travelling around Australia with, Arber and Katie. Fi was also on the bus when it arrived to pick us up because she had stayed at Liv Mills the night before and caught the bus at a different stop. Our first stop on the way to Mercury Bay was a massive 'hill' called Mt. Eden, it had yet again fantastic 360* views of the city. A little story our bus driver called Damo told us, was that apparently New Zealand is built upon something ridiculous like 173 volcanoe's, and some university student's who had graduated decided to play a prank on the city, so their great idea was to get loads of tyres and gasoline, put them in the crater of Mt. Eden and set them alight, thus in the morning when the city awoke there was mass panick as the city beleived this once dorment volcanoe was about to erupt! hahaha! we found it rather funny!

Anyway, after leaving Mt.Eden was continued our journey along we stopped in an old gold mining village of Thames, Captain Cook thought the main river that ran through it looked a lot like the river Thames, thus he named it....'Thames' After a brief stop for some body re-fuelage we continued along and stopped at Cathedral Cove, a lovely 45 minutes walk down to a gorgeous secluded cove, with a massive hole in the rock that funnily enough looked like a cathedral. After cruising over the Coromandel Ranges we arrived in Mercury Bay, also known by the fansinating Moari people as Whitianga, pronounced (Fit-e-ang-a) We stayed at a lovely little hostel called Turtle cove, to be honest it was more like a big house, they cooked a huge spaghetti bolognase which pretty much everyone had, before having a few drinks and then settling down for the night.