Hello ladies and gents,

Welcome to the first of our New Zealand blogs...let's hope you enjoy it! Well anyway we touched down in Auckland last Monday on the 1st June, it was bloody freezing! We checked into our cosy Formule 1 Hotel, which was like $39 a night...bit of a barge! Considering we were paying $36 for a camping place in Broome! Anyway Auckland is nice and NZ is cheap as chips compared to Australia. Auckland is a bit like Sydney but colder and maybe not as much going on but it's got beaches and a harbour bridge and stuff and it's the biggest city in NZ by a mile. We went down the Viaduct Harbour for dinner...as there are ten times more sheep in NZ than people then lamb shanks are everywhere...and i do love a good lamb shank!

Anyway we didn't do much else that Monday night then on the Tuesday we checked out a little suburb called Ponsoby with all little cafe's and then we headed to the Sky Tower to hang off the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere! Check out the photos, they're pretty good...except lucy has her eyes closed. But our guide Dale got us to hang over the edge...you can see the street right below you and there are no railings or anything. You have a harness attached to a railing that goes round above you that barely looks like it would hold my considerable weight. Anyway i started hanging over and all these things start clicking and im crapping myself, I wouldn't let go of the rope, then he's like lock your legs out and hang over and I was like "erm how about no?" Anyway lucy did it first time and by the time we got our photos taken I mangaed to strap on a pair and man-up. Though our group photo was a bit rubbish as the guy in the front was a complete s*** house! (There aint no other word)!! He was probably the most scared and quietest man I've ever met in my life and wouldn't do anything fun! Wohooo, nice one mate!

Anyway the next day we left Auckland on our "Magic Bus" and headed to Rotorua. Imagine a bus load of the gimpiest backpackers you've ever met! Imagine that...then times it by ten! These guys are serious retards! Everyone was dressed head to toe out of a charity shop with f***in walkin boots on like they were trekking some mountains or something! And they're all like lets be best mates and we're abit like "erm how about we sit here and you sit there" in our heads anyway! After having the camper van we're just not too into the whole "let's be friends with gimps" kinda thing. And the Magic bus defo aint too magic. It stops at every little place and has activities to do but if you don't want to waste your money then you just have to sit and wait three hours and watch the gimps waste their money instead...great fun! A 200km drive from Auckland took ten hours!!!

We got to Rotorua and it's a strange little place...I imagined NZ towns to be more like little English countryside towns but they're more like bland American towns you've never heard of. Anyway Rotorua has "geothermal activity" as the Earth's crust is thinner here then in other places and the gases and magma or whatever all come out the ground. That means there are lots of Spa's and alike but the best thing about Rotorua is the Kaituna River...which we rafted down! It was class! We went down "the biggest commercially rafted waterfall" which was pretty big and had lucy shaking in the back of the raft! Agian check out the photos because they're pretty good!

We left Rotorua on our favourite bus...and after many more uneccessary stops and 6hours later we arrived 60km down the road in Taupo which sits on the biggest lake in the Southern Hemisphere (Lake Taupo)...the skydiving capital of the world with over 30,000 jumps a year! So naturally we decided to jump out of a plane at 15,000 feet this morning! It was amazing, I wasn't even that nervous to be honest. Lucy was the first jumper out and I was the last, we got all the photos and a dvd. The views we're amazing though I wasn't really paying much attention! My guy Jonathan shuffled me to the edge then basically just jumps out! The first bit of freefall is amazing and you fall about 10,000 feet in 60 seconds, although it doesn't even feel like your falling because the ground isn't rushing up on you. Then the parachute opens and that's that and you take in all the views and the snow capped mountains and the lake etc and it looks top class! Lucy hated the freefall and says she'd never do it again because she was too cold and was literally hanging out the plane most of the way up to 15,000 feet. But for me them first ten seconds when you leave the plane are the biggest adrenaline rush you can get...and i've got to say it wasn't even scary.

So yeh that was today, one of the best Sunday morinings I've had in a while, defo beat going to church or whatever else you can do on a Sunday morning. We're off for some lunch now and to chill out.

In abit kids xx