Magical Times on the Magic Bus! We have now toured the North Island of New Zealand on the Magic Bus. The Magic Bus has arranged our itinerary for this non-stop tour of the North. They arrange all your travel and accomodation for you which makes it so easy and hassle free, the only thing you need to do is turn up for the bus on time! (there is a story behind this but we won't go into this right now!!.. ) We would highly recommend anyone travelling to use Magic; the drivers are great, very knowledgable and friendly and even tell us where to get a cheap Tui beer!

Started our tour from Auckland to Phaipa (the Bay of Islands) - it does what it says in the title! over 150 islands, very beautiful where you can do all sorts of activities like swim with dolphins. On the 2nd day, we travelled back to Auckland travelling through the towns on the West coast of the North Island. We stopped off and saw a video about Opo the wild 'gay' dolphin, who in the 1950's visited the bay and played with humans. The video was very '1950' style commentary and Sarah and Charlie couldn't control themselves when the very British commentator was talking about the 'happy gay dolphin, playing with children and letting kids ride on his slippery mount'. The room was silent apart from our shoulders jigging up and down and little sniggers. Went to a forest where it was raining heavily (hence the nice choice of packamacks! people were calling Sarah 'the smurf' all day!) where the oldest tree in NZ sits. It is called Taka. We are so grown up aren't we folks. From Auckland we then went to Routaro where we visited the 'glow worm' caves of Waitomo. This was magical and well worth a visit. We also visited the local rabbit shearing shed - not quite so magical as poor Bugs didn't look very happy. Went to Taupo which was beautiful - the lake is the size of Singapore and didn't dissapoint. We visited the Thermal Park which was incredible, hopefully the pics will do it justice. Also went on the Huka Jet at Huka Falls, a high powered speedboat that threw us around for 1/2 an hour! great fun! we loved it. It went up to 80mph and the driver did some fantastic 360 degree turns! Other people did the sky dives and bungys but we figured a 360 degree turn was more than enough! During the drive through the North island, the scenery has been amazing. The hills look greener, the cows look healthier and even the sheep look happier! We toured around 'Lord of the Rings' area, and stopped at Mount Doom where part of the film was shot. This is where the snow tipped mountains are in our pics. Last stop in the North is Wellington, a very cosmopolitan city, we went up hillside in the tram to soak in the views. This place is incredible and everyone says you wait till you see the South island. We are running out of vocab already to describe the amazing things we have seen.

We have been staying at the YHA hostels in each of the locations and we found these to be fantastic. Very clean and good facilities especially in Rotoura where we made use of their outdoor Thermal Pool which heated to 36 degrees ... lovely!

The funniest experience (so far) with our cooking whilst at the Hostels was in Rotoura. We have been eating out affordably over the last couple of weeks and we decided that we best do the 'traveller' thing and cook at the hostel. So, armed with pot noodle, we sat and cooked with our fellow companions. As we were boiling the water, we noticed that the others weren't eating pot noodle or cereal but were pulling out whole chickens and steaks!!! We have never felt so poor or undernurished in our lives :(