We arrived in Auckland on Tuesday having time travelled from Sunday night even though our flight from Santiago was only 13 hours. The flight was really good and was operated by the Chilean airline, LAN. It was much better than the BA flight we had previously had and a much larger selection of films of which I watched 4 and Beth kept up her reputation by sleeping most of the way! We landed at 4.30am and managed to get through customs within the hour. As it was still really early and dark, we located the McDonald's and grabbed a cup of tea whilst we waited for the sun to come up.

We caught the airbus express into the centre of Auckland and quickly found our hotel. Unfortunately for us, check in wasn't until 3pm but we were able to have a shower and dump our bags whilst we explored the city. Our first impressions of Auckland were great after coming from the relative chaos of South America. Auckland seems pretty organised and the centre of the city is easy to navigate on foot. We had a look up and down Queen street, which is the Main Street in the city centre. We then had a walk down to the harbour front which is quite upmarket. There are plenty of bars, restaurants and posh looking apartments with amazing views which we admired.

We eventually managed to get into our room at 3pm and the hotel had kindly upgraded us as we had waited all day. The room was much nicer than we had been used to in hostels and we had good views of the city skyline (particularly the Sky Tower which you can see from pretty much everywhere in Auckland). We grabbed something for tea and packed for the next day when we would be starting the kiwi experience. We were both asleep by about 8pm due to our body clocks being completely messed up!!

We were up early on Wednesday as we were starting the Kiwi Experience. We were picked up at half 8 and were headed to Hot Water Beach where we would be spending the night. We got there at about 2pm and checked into our hostel dorm for the night. It was actually a holiday park rather than a hostel and we were in a 5 bed dorm which had really modern toilets and showers and a shared kitchen. The facilities were much better than we thought they might be. After dumping our stuff, we headed down to the beach as it was low tide when you can supposedly dig a hole and a pool of hot water will rise to the surface which you can lie in. We got to the beach and found loads of other people who had the same idea. After a few minutes, we decided to check out the sea an dig a hole later. This was a much better choice! The waves on the beach were huge and by far the biggest we have ever been in the see with. We ended up jumping around in them with a few other people who are on the bus with us. The only downside was that we forgot to take our sunglasses off before we went into the sea. Needless to say we are both now sunglasses less!!!

After our bashing by the sea, we managed to find someone in our group who had dig a hole on the beach an had managed to find some hot water. We gleefully jumped in, and I managed to stay in for about 30 seconds before getting too hot whilst Beth managed a couple of minutes. It really was surreal, having come from the freezing cold sea into water which was boiling hot a couple of metres away.

After our trip to Hot Water Beach, we then went to Cathedral Cove. This involved a 40 minute walk to the cove which was a really nice beach with great views. We stayed there got about an hour then went back to the bus to head back to our accommodation. We were both a bit knackered, so we had our tea, soup with some bread, then sat around chatting to a few of our group before heading to bed around 10ish. All in all a great first day to the Kiwi Experience!!