From Hobbition we headed down to Rotorua, where we were barely in the place and we were hit by the distinctive sulphur eggy smell!!! We walked around Kuirau Park to see the geothermal activity...as we had seen some already in Bolivia we didn't feel the need to do the whole tour! From there we headed out to the lakes, taking in the spectacular views and stopping for a stroll near Lake Tarawera before heading to Lake Okareka to camp for the night. It was another be...

We had planned on doing the abseiling, rafting, rock climbing etc in the caves, but at 160 dollars each it was a little out of our early trip budget, so we have put it down to return on our way back up! So instead we went fishing...you probably could have seen that coming....in fairness it was a lovely little river (Tawarau) in a gorgeous setting so both Phil and Shane were happy.....especially when dinner was caught within the hour!!!...and Shane got another o...

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 hea...

We arrived into our final South American country, Chile. We needed to finish our planning for NZ and look into Australia too, so we spent a good bit of time just doing research. When we weren't doing research we were strolling around Santiago. It is a really nice city, one of our favourite main cities in South America. It is very walk able, has lots of nice street cafes and bars and has a nice relaxed vibe about it. We met up with Sara for a lovely afternoon, e...

We arrived into Mendoza after our last long South American overnight bus journey!!! We strolled from the bus terminal to our hostel, even though it was 9am in the morning, we were still passing people in open bars!!!..It's a pretty, green city, even though it's in a desert, due to its irrigation system using the natural supply of melted glacier water....thank goodness there was still enough left for good rafting!!! It was a Sunday when we arrived so the majorit...