Bula. After hearing so much about flooding in Fiji caused by a recent cyclone we boarded our flight from Auckland with grave expectations. The flight took less than three hours and was remarkable empty considering we were on a jumbo, the flight was pleasant, the food good and the extra leg space made it fly by. Pun intended! After our 'Jurassic park island' experience in the Whitsundays we were not too sure what to expect when we arrived in Fiji, as we had boo...

Day 30 - 38 After a few fun filled days in the middle of the north island we had planned to spend a couple of nights in the Coromandel peninsula then a few north of Auckland in the 'Northlands' before returning our spaceship. However, after another long day of driving and realising it was a national bank holiday we decided to give the north a miss and chill in the beautiful coromandel for the week. With a lack of reasonably priced campsites in the area, we stay...

Day 27. We almost froze to death during the night. It took us till the early hours of the morning to realise that if we just turned our bodies around (so our heads where not by the window) we would be a lot warmer. Matt is still adamant we should have taken the blankets from the first qantas flight we were on. I am starting to wish we had as we'd probably have gotten away with it, as stealing from airlines supposedly runs in Matt's family. We stopped in an i-si...

Day 23. We intended to spend the day swimming and walking around Rabbit Island, but as the weather looked ominous we scrapped plan A and decided to drive straight to Picton, stopping only for lunch and to buy more food. Picton was much smaller than we had expected. There was not as much to see and do as Nelson but the Queen Charlotte Sound and other scenery went some way to making up for it. The north east of the south island is comprised of lots of different sou...

Day 20. The drive to Nelson was fairly long and arduous but it was raining in Kaikoura and we had seen our whale, another tick on the list. On the way, we passed through just a taste of Marlborough's countless vineyards. It was still enough to be amazed by. Nelson and the Abel Tasman National Park are renowned for being the sunniest parts of the country and the sun was shining when we arrived in the late afternoon. The first thing (or things) we saw upon arriva...