Today we made the mammoth journey from Picton in the South Island all the way up the North Island to Taupo. As we visited the North Island on our last trip we are just catching up on the bits we missed out on last time. In order to catch a connecting bus and not spend the night in Wellington we were catching the 6.25a.m. ferry so we were up at some unearthly hour and we started the crossing in the dark. Luckily it was getting light as we were coming out through ...

From Motueka and the Abel Tasman we caught the bus over to Picton which surprised off by being a lovely little town and not just the gateway over to the North Island. It helped we were greeted by sunshine so we spent yesterday afternoon down on the green overlooking the waterfront and playing cards! In hindsight we should have stayed here for longer as we had a nice little set up in the hostel with a whole "flat" to ourselves for three nights we are her...

What a sweet day, well worth the money and how tired I am tonight I can barely keep my eyes open! We started with an early pickup at seven thirty to head down to the sea kayak company base in Motueka where the trailer was loaded up with kayaks and we were off to Marahau to catch the water taxi. It's very strange getting on a boat on the road then being towed by a tractor into the water! The water taxi was taking us up to Onetahuti Beach where we would start our ...

You become good friends with the "i-site" centres whilst travelling New Zealand so I thought it was apt to use the logo as the blog photograph! They are generally the first place you are dropped at when arriving by bus, you can find anything from where to sleep to where to be thrown out of an aeroplane in there and seeing the logo means seeing a safe place where there is staff to sort out your weird and wonderful plans! We arrived in Motueka yesterday ...

Yesterday we made the final stint of our trip up the west coast of the South Island with our journey from Punakaiki to Nelson. Not a particuarly long journey around four hours but we were let down by our "perfect" hostel. Although check out is at 10a.m. most hostels are happy for you to hang around and use the facilities until you're ready to go or your bus leaves. Unfortunately with this place being 4km from where the bus leaves from we had to rely on...