Kia Ora!

We arrived in Hamilton on Thursday evening after a short bus journey on Nakedbus.com - thankfully everyone was fully clothed! When we got to Hamilton, Lappin met us and took us to our home for the next few days at Ciaran and Courtney's. We settled in for the evening and made ourselves at home.

On Friday we woke up relatively early and made our way to Waitomo in rather dreary and grim weather. We were keen to get to Waitomo Caves as we'd heard good things about the famous glowworms there. We booked ourselves onto the 11am tour of the caves, the tour comprised of a short walk through the cave with a guide who informed us about the different rock formations. After about half an hour we boarded a small boat and were pulled through the pitch black by our elderly tour guide whilst gazing up at the hundreds and thousands of small green lights made by the glowworms, they look like thousands of little stars lining the cave. The glowworms weave a sticky thread which hangs down to catch their pray which are attracted by the small green lights. The glowworms with the brightest lights are the hungriest and are pulling out all the stops to attract some insects to eat! After our boat ride we headed back to Delilah, Lappin's car which he generously lent us for our stay on the North Island, and went back to Hamilton in preparation for the Super 15 rugby game which Lappin had bought us tickets for. We were going to support the Chiefs playing against the Sharks at the Waikato Stadium and even though it was raining; we had a really good night watching from the terrace behind the posts. Sophie even managed to get her hands on a freebie Chiefs flag which she continued to wave nonstop throughout the game! The Chiefs won!

Saturday was another early morning, with the alarm waking us at 6.45am, as we'd arranged to head back up to Auckland with Lappin for Polyfest. Polyfest is the biggest Pacific Islands cultural festival in the world where schools from all over Auckland take part and compete against each other. After meeting up with Tash, her sister Desma and her twin girls, Mia and Liana, we headed straight to the Cook Islands stage where we watched a school complete all of their dances - thoroughly enjoying them all, our unknowledgeable eyes thought they were brilliant but the more experienced of our group, Mia and Liana, told us the performance was average! We headed onwards to the Maori stage which was to be our favourite stage of the day! The performances were amazing and all included the Haka. We were really surprised to see that people in the audience reply to the Haka at the end of the performance by grouping together, or standing individually, and replying to the pupils on stage. We spent the rest of the day walking around the different Pacific Islands stages and enjoying the beautiful, but scorching, weather before making our way back to Hamilton.

On our way back Lappin suggested taking a slight detour to Bridal Veil Falls and Raglan Beach. After a 20 minute walk, we reached the bottom of the falls and it was pretty spectacular. We managed to get some funny photos of the three of us, as well as some nice ones for the collection! The only downside was having to trek back up the steps, much to Sophie's disgust as she arrived back at the top somewhat lacking in breath!

We arrived at Raglan about half an hour before the sun went down, so we enjoyed a walk along the black sand beach before settling down with some chips to watch the sunset. One of the most beautiful things about New Zealand at night is that as the sun is setting you can see the moon on the other side of the night sky, which is pretty amazing! It was made even more spectacular as this was the night that the moon was the closest it has been to earth, making it look even bigger than usual.

We pigged out on a McDonalds in front of the rugby league and ended a long day by hitting our beds!

Lots of love, Sophie and Kie xx