Day 45 - Sun 14th Dec - Auckland

After 46 hours of travelling, one lost day and a 15 hour time difference, I finally arrived in Auckland about 7am on Sunday. First of all I had to deal with the NZ customs, they had sniffer dogs patrolling the baggage claim area. Now, I don't know what image your mind conjures up when you think of sniffer dogs, but I bet its not the cutest looking beagle puppy sniffing your bags for, fruit. Yes, seriously they want to make sure you don not have any fruit or plants in your bag. Not drugs, weapons or anything else dangerous, just nothing that had once been in contact with soil.

The customs card that you complete on the way through as whether you have done any hiking or trekking in the last 30 days (erm, the Andes) or been on a farm or in contact with any livestock (yep, estancia). So I had to go into one of the side rooms and stand in a puddle of disinfectant type stuff so there was no traces of that pesky soil on my shoes (never mind the fact that I still had trousers and gloves in my bag covered in mud!).

Very tired, jet lagged and not thinking straight I then hopped straight into a taxi to my hostel. A taxi! What was I thinking?! Just used to South American prices by now. $70 later I arrived at the hostel - I will definitely be investigating the shuttle bus options on the way back!

The hostel kindly let me into my room early so I could have a sleep. I had about 3 hours sleep then forced myself to get out of bed to get used to the time difference (15 hours from Argentina, 13 from UK).

The hostel was in the Ponsonby area of the city, which is on the outskits and not in the centre (I deliberately had picked somwhere quiet so I could get over the jet lag), so I just spent the day walking around. Its a nice area which lots of trendy bars and restaurants. I had lunch with a girl from the hostel, then carried on strolling around. I actually made it right into the city centre as, despite being the largest city in NZ, its really not a big city at all so didnt take long to walk arounnd (but I did get the bus back!).

Cooked a meal in the evening in the hostel and just sat in talking to some people there and trying very hard to stay awake. Managed to stay awake until 10pm, which had been my target time, then slept like a baby for 12 hours!

Day 46 - Mon 15th Dec - Auckland

Another very gentle day just getting aclimatised (talking of which, much colder than Argentina!!). Wandered into the centre of the city again, it was a bit busier than the previous day which as it was Sunday was very quiet. Spent a while in an Internet cafe and went to the offices to sort out my bus ticket.

The bus ticket that I bought was a backpacker bus pass with a company called Magic, there are loads of similar companies in NZ offering almost identical services. The way it works is you buy a ticket for a particular route and then you can just hope on an off for a long as you like in each destination. Some places are compulsory stops and there are loads of optional ones, and the bus journeys in between tend to take slight detours and stop to do things on the way, unlike a straight forward intercity type bus. You can also book activities, accomodation and onward buses through the bus drivers every day so it is very convenient.

My bus trip was due to start the next morning, so I had another quite night in the hostel getting myself ready.

Day 47 - Tues 16th Dec - Auckland to Rotorua

The start of my bus trip. The hostel I was staying in was not a designated pick up point for the bus, so at 7am I had to traipse accross town with all my bags to go to one of the pick up points.

It took about 40 mins to drive around to all the pick up points, then we drove up to Mount Eden to have a view of Auckland before heading off towards Rotorua. Around lunch time we stopped for a few hours in Waitomo. Waitomo is home to lots of caves and particularly well known for it's glow worm caves. I opted to do the glowworm cave tour, but as this is New Zealand there were obviously more adventurous options on over such as abseiling into the caves, or black water rafting through them in complete darkness. The tour took about 45 minutes, first of all we walked through them listening to the history of how they were discovered and how old they are. You could see a few glow worms in the crevices at this point, but then we went on a short (very short!) boat ride to get out of the caves and the ceiling was covered in them then and it was much darker so it looked great. They don't let you take photos inside the caves, which I'm sure has far more to do with them selling postcards than anything to do with disturbing the glowworms!

Then it was back on the bus for a few more hours until we got to our destination of Rotorua. I had booked 3 nights in Rotorua but as we arrived at 6pm and would be leaving early in the morning I only really had two days to do anything.