We arrived at waitomo around lunch time and the plan was to stay one night to explore some of the famous waitomo caves and their even more famous glow worms. The area was full of companies which offered various adrenaline fueled trips involving caving, abseiling and rafting though the rivers which run into the caves in small inflatable rubber rings. Being a bit scared of the dark and not great in confined spaces I couldn't think of anything worse than floating th...

If you look up Hamilton in any guide book you will read that it is not a very exciting place to visit and is more a passing through point than a tourist destination. For us it was a must visit as it is where Michael spent a summer playing rugby around 9 years ago. He was keen to go back to his old haunts to see if anything had changed both at the rugby club he played at and the town he lived in for some 6 weeks all those years ago. I having heard all about his tr...

So we are on the move again and today's destination was to be hot water beach. Now when we set off for this journey we knew it was to be one of the longest drives we would have to do and by far the longest to date! I don't think either of us had really thought that if the guide book said 4 hours that they were talking 4 hours by car. Our poor little van had to put in a real shift that day and it took us around 6 hours to get to camp! Michael had done most of the ...

It was time to leave Auckland and head up north to the Bay of Islands. Many of the guidebooks state that north of Auckland is rarely explored by visitors so we wanted to take a few days up there to look around and see what it had to offer. It was a pretty long drive there but we had started early so when we arrived we had time to take in the Waitangi National Heritage site. We had no idea on arrival at the Bay of Islands that it is one of the most important place...

So we made it safely from Sunny Fiji to Rainy, freezing Auckland and boy was that a shock to the system! Our first night was fairly uneventful as we didnt arrive into new zealand until about 6pm. It was too late to collect our campervan so the first evening was spent at a hostel next to the airport. We were collected there by the man who runs the hostel and the whole journey from start to finish had been pretty painless! The first priority was to get some dinner...