Thanks again for all the messages guys-it's nice to know we haven't been forgotten! The day before yesterday we headed from Nelson to Bleinham with the intention of staying one night and then moving on, but when we got there one of the only hostels we could find that had vacancies was in the middle on a run down industrial estate and looked pretty gross, so we decided to head straight to Kaikoura. It was another really pretty drive, and when we got closer to the ...

From Nelson we headed to Abel Tasman Park-it's a really nice area with a few beaches and lots of mountains, and apparently a few treks if you're that way inclined (which we aren't!) We stayed in a little place called Old MacDonalds fram-we had a little chalet with an outdoor kitchen, and everytime we went outside to cook something we were suddenly surrounded by chickens and ducks and a peacock who all wanted to share with us. There was also a llama who ran toward...

We have now made our way to the south island! From Taupo we headed to Turangi, which was very quiet, but we had a little walk along the river and up a little hill which was really nice. From there we headed to Napier, which is known for it's wine tasting and art-deco themed city-we didn't do any wine tasting because all of the vineyards were quite far out of town, but we had a walk round the town which looked a little bit dated because of the art-deco stuff. I t...

WE WENT SKY-DIVING!!! It really was a stupid thing to do as we're not insured for it, but we figured that if something went wrong chances are we wouldn't make it to a hospital anyway. It was awesome! We booked it yesterday for this morning at 11am, and ever since then I've been terrified while Sam was very calm about the whole thing. We got geared up and headed to the plane which we shared with another couple. We dropped them off at 12,oo feet and it was a horrib...

Rotorua has been quite action-pavked so far! We drove from Auckland to the Waitomo caves, where we visited the glow worm cave (it has thousands of glow worms on the ceiling-it was really pretty until i could see then looked like maggots.), and another cave which was massive and also very pretty. We then headed to Rotorua and settled in the treks backpackers hostel (after we couldn't find the one we'd booked with), but it's more like a hotel than a hostel-the shar...