Out with the old and in with the new. Or should that be, out with the warm and in with the New Zealand?!

New Zealand had an immidiate impact on me and reminds me alot of home with the left side driving, similar landscape, roadsigns and most depressingly - the weather. It's a cool 14 degrees outside during the daytime so our shorts and flipflops have been made redundant for our 7 weeks here. The positive about the weather is that it will give us the chance to ski and snowboard and really take in the epicness of glaciers and hot sand beaches.  

We arrived in Auckland at 20:15 on Monday night having left at 17:30 on Sunday and only flown for 4 hours (work that one out!). We had 4 nights to explore the city before picking up our campervans and setting off on our kiwi adventure. Our first full day was spent mostly catching up with the world as we rediscovered the web and everyones photos on facebook. I managed to develop my underwater photos that came out really well and reminded me off the great time I had in Rarotonga. On the short walks we had around the city we discovered the vast amount of shops along Queens street and grasped the height of the sky tower. We also found the pickup point for our campervans and took advantage of the free meal our hostel put on - b e a uitiful! Following that up we failed to win the local pub quiz (no change there) before crashing out in our hostel for the night. 

After a fairly uneventful day we planned to take part on a free bus tour around the city. The tour was run by one of the backpacker companies 'stray' who offered bus passes across New Zealand stopping at all the major sights. Our expectations were low seeing as it was free but the orientation to Auckland turned out to be great. Driving around the city was fun to begin with and it really let you take in it's size and sights. We ventured up to watch people jump off the sky tower before driving around the southern hemispheres largest marina and taking in the city skyline from atop one of the 40+ volcanoes that make up the area. After stopping for lunch we were driven off to the highlight of the tour for me. We were lucky enough to be given free passes to walk across the Auckland bridge and watch nutcases bungee jump below it. At that point it really dawned on me how big Auckland is. The bungee itself is below the bridge and people dive off to plunge into the bay below. It looked amazing but i didn't quite fancy it knowing that there'd be bigger and better fishes to fry coming up. Still, it's true what they say - the best things in life are free! Later that evening we decided to go explore the docks and marina where Aucklands nightlife was apparently situated. We'd heard of a ice bar called '5 degrees' which we wanted to experience and eventually found our way there. Why not make things even colder eh? I've been in an ice bar before in Barcelona but this one just didn't compare. The cold was rediculously numbing and the bar itself was packed full of sculptures. At one point the bar tender offered a free shot to the person who got naked first... George and Beans were off and managed to fluke a tie meaning they both got one. What made it even more awesome was that it was poured through one of the ice sculptures.  

Onto Thursday and I was up early knowing that we could go and pick out our campervans! After waiting for the other lads to rise, we set off for some breakie before checking out the vans and designs we'd be touring round the country. There was a fleet of about 8 or 9 there, all of which had sweet graffiti designs all over them. We found out the vans were also fully automatic, came with everything we'd need and could actually sleep up to 3 meaning that we'd hopefully get a bit of room between the two of us. After picking out our favourite design each we all went for a little shop to pick up a few bits and pieces that we'd need. My essential was some thick socks to keep the toesies warm! The afternoon rolled on in a pretty chilled fashion before we hit the hostels organized bar crawl. It took us between 4 bars and gave us a free drink in each. We even went into a bar called 'Cassette' which served you drinks from teapots! The crawl was rammed full of people with almost 200 people in attendance. And of all the people, James 'Beans' Wild steps up and goes and wins the guitar hero competition grabbing himself a free stray bus pass around north NZ... Shame it wasn't something more useful :-(

And so came an end to our Auckland adventure. The following morning we picked up our campervans and after a short shop we were off due north! The planned drive was a 4 hour cruise up to Paihai up in the bay of islands.