Well I'm back in Auckland after heading up to the Bay of Islands and its the final day in my New Zealand adventure, scary stuff, tomorrow we'll be on our final chapter, it is a pretty big chapter though, big, bad, South America, can't wait, proper travelling!

On the one night we had previously stayed in Auckland the boys surprised me with a birthaday celebration which consisted of a Japanese meal, nice one guys, good stuff. We ordered a fair bit of food including raw Octopus, not reccommended, although G'bo took a afancy to it. It was a well nice feed, thanks again boys!

The following day it was time to get back on the bus upto Paihia but first of all we would stop at Whangarei so me and G'bo could sample some Poor Knights diving, regarded as one of the best dive sights in the world, sweet! The hostel we stayed at was family run and it had a massive trampoline, we had hours of fun bouncing around attempting somersaults and stuff! The day after we did our dives, it was the first time I've been diving since Cairns so I was pretty excited and we soon got back into the jist of things! To be honest though I was quite disapointed in the dives it didn't compare to the Barrier Reef, but I suppose its a tough act to follow! We had two dives the first of which we swam round into a big cave which was pretty cool and we saw a big scorpion fish! There's lots of kelp in the area that you can just swim around its not like the Barrier Reef where you can't touch anything its definatey hands on! After a big day we headed back to the hostel and got some kip as we were heading upto to the Bay of Islands the following day.

The Bay of Islands is pretty cool, its a pictoresque place with lots of islands as you might have guessed! Kind of similar to Whitsundays but not quite as spectacular! We did some fishing here and I caught 5 red snapper, unfortunately they were below the legal size so I had to throw them back in and couldn't eat them, gutted! We had a pretty fun day fishing and we all manged to catch stuff, nothing we could eat though!

We caught the bus back the same day and now we are in Auckland again slightly hungover after our last night out in NZ last night! Now its time for the big stuff, South America, bring it on! My comments on NZ would be that the south island is gorgeous and the stuff you can do there is out of this world, definately the best place I have visited and probably the only place so far I could see my self actually living! The north island on the other hand isn't that spectacular, it has a few gems like caving but doesn't compare to the south!