I guess its my turn to write a blog, now Becki has her ipod touch she had gone blog crazy! Well after Taupo we headed up to Mount Maunganui which was the last stop over before Auckland. With Becki still feeling blue (at death door with Man Flu) we chilled out at the hostel and I convinced her it would be a good idea to climb the mount to the top and watch the sun set. We started the 3km walk to the mount fully prepared with an ice cream in one hand and a can of "V" energy drink in the other. As we aimed to watch the sun set we took the medium path, takes slightly longer but not so strenuous and we had time so we started off ok. We were causally walking through some green grassed land with sheep all around us and sea was at the bottom, it kinda of reminded me of the Corfe Castle walk. We continued up the both singing away out loud to our I pods (we still haven't got into the fact that NZ can speak English!)

After about 50 minuets of chilled out walking we were met with the decision of either 15 minuets hard hike or 30 minuets medium hike, I am sure you can guess which one we took. Well the last half of the hike was a lot harder as it was all up hill however the views were epic. We regularly stopped to take pictures and drink V. We Made it up to the top and Becki even had a smile on her face as the view was perfect. We had a fault less panoramic view of Mount Maunganui's town, port, harbour in the horizon and below us was was 10 km of white golden sand with huge surf crashing onto the beach. They have an artificial reef here too to increase the surf waves. After playing some traditional traveling card games we sat in ore as the sunlight hit the few clouds in the sky, with the light beams bouncing off each other creating all different colours from red, orange and yellow which resulted in a wonderful show. To add to it we had "don't let the sun go down on me" playing on our I pods. The walk down was almost equally as hard as the walk up especially as we took a wrong turn and ended walking the long way home!

After reaching the bottom of the Mount we decided to walk home a different way and get some fish and chips as a treat. We had a few interesting discussions during the walk back, we put the worlds to rights and analysed NZ's people. Our conclusion from what we had seen was that most were incredible people who were happy and bubbly. There was a less obvious rich poor divide compared to all the other countries, for sure there were rich people and poor people but we saw hardly any beggars and only a few flashy people.

We found a fish and chip shop which happened to be the one we were suggested by the hostel. We got very excited about eating out as it was only the second time while in NZ. We ordered our yummy food and even splashed out and brought a few extras, globed it down and went to sleep on a full tummy. We had an early rise the next morning for our last North Island journey back to Auckland.