Hey all,

Another blog entry... you lucky b*****s :)

Right then I'm going to keep this pretty short as we'll probably be talking baout places you guys have never heard of (and I can't remember some of the names :))

Well first day arrived in Auckland at 7am to be greeted with sunshine :) Something I definitley needed after having an old lady all over me on our 13hr flight.. legs, arms, face...everything, I oculdn't believe it! First day was pretty quiet we headed into the city centre and then striaght out again down to a lovely beach.. mission bay. How amazing it felt to be able to sunbath finally! Not much more to say about that day as I slept for most of the day and then Jay was knackered ain the evening as he had powered through the day.. we did manage however to find a NANDOS.... which pleased Jay no end!

Day 2 in Auckland - Jay had read that the Auckland museum was a must see... :s (I wasn't too sure as it didn't involve catching any rays) but we had a nice morning there and then headed to one of Aucklands many volcanoes Mt Eden to test out my new fashionable waslking shoes (as you can see from pics... what have i turned into!). Must admit tho that from the top the views of Auckland were pretty awesome.

Day 3 - Can you believe it we woke up to it absolutely chucking it down. I think all of my boasting about the sunshine had come back to bite me! Had a pretty chilled out day at hostel but we did brave the rain only because we needed food! I think this may have been the day that we counted up how much we had been spending on food and realised that we would need to stop eating out for breakfast, dinner and tea... I did wondwr why all of the othe rbackpackers were making food at the hostel ...!

Day 4 - Jay had another ingenious idea about hiring bikes to take over to one of the islands -Waiheke. I must admit I was quite excited about having a leisurely ride around this beautiful island. Well it started off well we had a nice ride through a small track but once that ended and we joined the road towards one of the recommended beaches the nightmare began (well for me!) I have never seen so many steep hills in my life, left alone having to bloody try and bike up them. Well after about half an hour I was knackered and had to get off my bike and walk with it... at this point we had done about 1k of the 6k ride to the first beach.! You will all be pleased to hear however that we did make it and the beach was gorg so was def worth it.! We only had however about 1hr there before we had to start our way back as it took us (me) so long to get there..... AND we had to get back remember.. nightmare.. we even tried hitchhiking.. nobody wanted us and our bikes not even the buses!!

Day 5 - Again pretty chilled out day for my legs to recover and had a bus ride arranged for the afternoon to take us upto Pahia in the Bay of Islands. Carrie a couple of your WOW's coming up!! Firstly the 4hr bus journey was AMAZING! The scenery was SOOO pretty! So many times we wished we could stop to take pictures! We got to Paihia at about 8 just as the sun was setting and it looked out of this world!

Day 7 - We had booked a sailing trip out to the islands and it was great! Clear waters, beautiful sunshine, amazing scenery within all the islands....AND DOLPHINS!! :)) There were about 10 of them swimming literally next to the boat. Its difficult to describe just how beautiful the surroundings were but hopefully the pics will give do it some justice seeing as I (its Jay now, nics bored of typing!!) splashed out on a new camera as my one literally fell apart!

Day 8 - This brings us to the present. We're back in Auckland now waiting to get our bus tomorrow morning to take us on our journey south...have a look at www.straytravel.com... we've booked the short moe ticket so you can get a feel of our travel plans for the next month.

Bye for now and check out the pics when we've uploaded them!

Love to you all. Nic and Jay. xxx