So we left Santiago on the 6th and 2 days later landed into Auckland!!! That was a 13 hour flight but we had gone over the timeline!!

We arrived into Auckland at the lovely time of 4.30am.....so our main mission for the day was to stay awake as long as possible and show jet lag who is the boss!!!! This then became an even harder challenge as we couldn't check into our hostel until 1pm!!!!...so we spent the long morning finalising our plans and battling the heavy eyes....

After a bite for lunch we headed off to see some of the place, and to pick up Shanes fishing license....seeing as he has promised to feed Phil cheaply for the next 6 weeks...no pressure there then!!!:)

Auckland seems like a really nice city, and we will explore it more when we return for Paddy's day and our last few days here before Oz.

We somehow managed to stay awake till 9pm....which was an amazing achievement!!!

We were up before 6am, but we were ok with that...the worst was over and we were off to pick up our campervan!!!

We thought that being in a English speaking country would be a blessing...but after asking about the cricket and getting a detailed account of the taxi drivers marital problems in reply we were beginning to miss the language barrier that we had had for the last while!!!! He managed to get us where we needed to be, and so the campervan adventure begins!!!

We needed to get some supplies and a fishing rod before we hit the road proper, which was probably a good thing...as neither of us had driven in 5 months....and the camper is automatic!! Which takes a bit of getting used to, even though it really makes life so simple!!!

Our first destination was on the West coast, Raglan. It's a short but scenic journey from Auckland. We took the less direct roads and enjoyed the trip through the rolling hills. Raglan is a surf town, we had plans to do a few bits in ...but the reality was we were a bit tired for too much!!! So we took a stroll on the beach, and then found our campground for the night...and got used to cooking, living and sleeping in the camper....which is pretty much a people carrier converted with a cooker, sink and bed!!! COZY!!!

Funnily enough we managed to fall asleep no problems!!!!..We were also the first up in the campsite.....our second 6am wakeup call!!!

As we were up so early we decided to head to the Bridal Veil Falls, for a quick walk and to check out our first NZ waterfall. As we were so early we had the place to ourselves. Once we were done we decided to take the direct route to Waitomo, which turned out to be a gravel road, which technically we aren't meant to be on.....and took a lot longer than we had predicted too!!!..The trade-off was seeing some awesome scenery.