New Zealand - North Island Part 2

Wellington
We arrived in Wellington on the 26th October after our ferry ride from Picton. Wellington lived up to its nickname "windy wellington", it was a city that was overcast and not that great at all compared to the beautiful scenery we were used to! We spent the afternoon walking around the city and took a nice stroll along the waterfront which was nice. Due to the fact that we had to get up at 7am the next morning we headed back to our hostel, cooked some dinner and headed up to bed for an early night. As we had missed out on our skydive in Taupo previously we decided to head back there to give it another go...fingers crossed.

Taupo
We arrived in Taupo at around mid-day on Tuesday with the weather miserable and rainy so we couldn't even attempt to do our long awaited skydive! That afternoon we met up with our old friends Craig and Laura who we started our incredible journey with back in June after meeting them on the Inca Trail. We both immediately hit it off with them and it was fantastic to catch up with them and spend a few hours eating and drinking beer and wine, Jess to say the least was a little tipsy by the end of the night! We awoke the next morning blurry eyed which quickly changed after Jess told Lee to get out of bed to peep behind the curtain for a weather check, pure blue skies, hurray!!! We got picked up from our hostel from the skydive company at 10am and set off for our skydive, 15,000ft, 60 second freefall...here we come!!! Craig and Laura also came with us which was lovely of them! The skydive was perfect although Lee was pretty scared on the way up in the plane - he was shaking with nerves! To throw yourself out of a plane at any height is incredible but to do it over somewhere so beautiful made it all that more amazing, we will never ever forget it. That evening we chilled and watched films in the hostel before catching our next bus to Pahia at 9.45am the next morning.

Pahia (Bay of Islands)
We arrived in Pahia late Thursday evening and headed to a hostel called Saltwater Lodge. We grabbed a snack from the cafe next door before heading back to the lounge area to watch a film. No such luck! A group of about 40 Danish students were there having a party and being a pain singing songs out of tune and pretending to be drunk on Barcardi Breezers! We gave up and headed back to our room to go to bed. The next day we caught a ferry across to Russell, a tiny, pretty little town which is the oldest town in New Zealand. We spent the next couple of hours walking around and headed up to a lookout point from which you could see some of the many islands forming the well known Bay of Islands. We had lunch at a cute little cafe on the beach front, then after lunch made our way back to Pahia and went to the supermarket to buy dinner. That evening we watched a film called Essex Boys, then went to bed as we had to be on our next bus at 7.20am the next morning, back to where we had started our New Zealand adventure...Auckland.

Auckland
We arrived in Auckland at around mid-day pretty excited as we knew that we were flying to Fiji the next day! We spent the day in Auckland chilling out reading up which islands we were going to visit once we got to Fiji. The travel monkeys were looking forward to a relaxing 2 weeks after 5 months of hardcore travelling! ;o)