Today we needed to get a little further south to help meet the ferry and Tom decided he wanted to see the mountains up close so we found another campsite in the DOC brochure which looked nice. En route we stopped off in Taupo hoping to use the internet in the library but it wasn't open access, instead we visited a charity shop and bought some goodies, bed linen, a flask, and a Christmas CD. We drove towards the mountains for a few hours with the awful Christma...

So the plan for today, before heading further south was to visit the thermal village. By the time we had breakfast and packed away the tent it was nearing lunch before we got to the village, unfortunately it was set up for a full day visits. We thought we probably wouldn't get our moneys worth, and decided to move on and visit one in the next town. Tonight we are going Bear Grills style and camping at a Department of Conservation (DOC) site, of which there are...

We slept well last night and woke up fairly late, we packed everything away and set off on our journey south. We only have seven days to get to Wellington, where we are catching the ferry across to the South island. The first stop was the tourist information where we spoke to a nice lady who gave us lots of brochures with things to do and see on the way down. Now having a little more knowledge, we headed to Rotorua, a town known for its thermal activity. It to...

We went to bed at about 9.00pm last night hoping to get a decent sleep before we had to get up. Everyone in the dorm was really noisy up until midnight so when we got up at 2.00am, we didn't make any effort to keep the noise down and even turned the light on to check we had packed everything up. We walked down to the bus station to catch our bus to the airport. The flight was fine and we managed to have a sleep. We arrived in Auckland and went to pick up our h...