We are reaching the end of our stint in New Zealand now, and tomorrow fly to Santiago to begin the South America leg of our trip. It's all slightly unplanned at the minute, other than knowing we fly into Santiago tomorrow, then want to go straight to Mendoza to learn some Spanish and that we have to be in Cusco for the Machu Picchu Trek around 22nd July. So yes, that's all a bit vague really.

Anyway, what have we been up to since the last blog update? We travelled to Christchurch, where we didn't get tickets to the England vs All Blacks match on 21st June. Instead we watched it in a pub, which was probably best as England were pretty poor...I don't even know much about rugby, but even I could tell it was not a good performance. From ChCh we were off to Kaikoura again, where the weather once again scuppered my plans to swim with dolphins. The waves in the bay were massive, so I assume it was even worse further out where the dolphins were.

The weather since leaving Queenstown has really tried to ruin all the activities we wanted to do! We headed up to the North Island after Kaikoura, spending 3 hours on a ferry, during which we got to watch Jeremy Kyle and Neighbours, but we'd already seen the Neighbours episode in Australia. In Washington the weather continued to switch crazily quickly from sun to rain. We went to Te Papa Museum, which was quite interesting, though there was lots of reading to do. We also went to Wellington Zoo, and appeared to be the only visitors to the Zoo that day. We saw a kiwi, which was very exciting. They are such bizarre animals and make this freaky snuffling noise as they sniff about in the leaves. It's quite scary when you can't see them, as you can just hear the snuffling noise and see bushes shaking.

We also went out bowling with some of the guys from our Kiwi Experience bus whilst in Wellington. I was rubbish (again) though managed to get through 2 games without ripping my trousers this time. James was slightly less rubbish than me, but everyone else we were playing against were better than us (James isn't reading what I'm writing and would probably very much disagree that everyone else was better than him).

Our next stop after Wellington was Taupo, where we were hoping to do the Tongariro Crossing (I've made up the spelling for that) which is a 1 day hike. It's meant to be quite strenuous so we were hoping it might in a small way prepare us for the Machu Picchu trek. However, the weather was against us and we were told that due to a storm over the National Park the trek would not be going ahead for the next few days. Since this was all we'd hoped to do in Taupo we decided to skip spending a full day there and head northwards to Rotorua.

Arriving in Rotorua the bus was filled with the smell of rotten eggs. This was not because the local "yoof" had been letting off stink bombs, but because of the sulphur produced with all the geothermal activity in the area. Nice?!

On our first day in Rotorua a group of us headed out to do Zorbing, where you basically get stuck in a big see through bouncy ball with some warm water and roll down a hill. It's the human equivalent of those hamster balls for those of you have ever owned a hamster and those see through balls you can put them in to roam around in. As it was freeeezing cold that day I decided not to partake in the zorbing (a decision that would come back to bite me in the bum in Auckland) but James got kitted out in his swim wear and rolled down a zig zagging path like a giant hamster in a ball. Apparently, you got a second zorb free if you managed to get all the way down the hill standing up, but no one in our group did. In fact I think it's quite hard to do on the zigzaggy course. There was a straight course and the zorb man said he had stayed standing on that course, but not the zigzag one.

That evening we went to a Maori cultural experience. A group of us were picked up from our hostel and we were driven out to the Maori village. On the way there we were told about the Maoris' journey to the Land of the Long White Cloud (aka New Zealand) and were told that we were now a tribe who had just landed on the island. After doing some "rowing" to get to shore, we arrived at the village and were greeted by a very scary Maori display, where our "chief" who had been randomly selected from our coach, had to stand and be intimidated by these Maori warriors and accept their peace offering...Otherwise we would have been beaten up. Story has it that an American guy laughed at the Maori Warriors and ended up with a broken nose! Anyway, after the scary introduction we wandered through the village and then were presented with some traditional Maori dances and songs and saw the haka. It was great. After this we had a hangi - a MASSIVE buffet meal cooked Maori style in an underground oven thing. We all ate way too much. James ate so much that when we got back to our hostel he couldn't go to bed straight away as lying down made him feel ill.

We visited another Maori village the following day. This one was built on geothermals and had an impressive array of geysers, which we watched "erupt", and bubbling hot water pools of around 120 degrees centigrade. Ouch! Unfortunately, we were once again nearly drowned by torrential downpours, so we didn't see as much of the mud pools and things as we would have liked.

On our third day in Rotorua we tried to go to Waitomo Caves to see the glow worms and float through the caves on a rubber ring. After having to get up at 6am to make sure we had enough time to get to Waitomo we were told that all the caves were shut due to the heavy rainfall over the last couple of days. So the weather once again ruined our plans. Instead we decided to go luging in the rain. Luging for those of you who don't know is basically like go-karting, except you don't have an engine, instead the track is downhill, so you just roll down hills at scary speeds. It's so much fun, even in the pouring rain and freezing cold. There were three tracks "scenic", "intermediate" and "advanced". We had a go at all three, but advanced was everyone's favourite because you can't really believe that you got all the way round the course without dying!!! At some points on the course my luge wasn;t even on the ground as I'd flown over bumps on the course. I have no idea why there isn't a luge course in England. It's fantastic. James nearly flew off the advanced track on every corner as he couldn't get his brakes to work! I managed to get round each course without crashing, until the final corner where I wouldn't turn enough and I'd get one of the wheels of the luge stuck over the side of the barrier, causing a pile up behind me. Strangely, it was only on the advanced track that I managed to avoid crashing on the last bend. I look forward to trying to pass my driving test again when I'm back in England!!!

After leaving Rotorua we spent a night in Auckland and then got up early the next day to head to the "winter-less north" and the Bay of Islands. We had a glorious one and a half days of sunshine and temperatures around 20 degrees. We went sea kayaking and visited some of the islands in the bay. We got much wetter than we thought we would kayaking! We were approached by a TV crew who were looking for British people to talk about New Zealand for a new advertising campaign in England. We were tempted in by the promise of a free bottle of wine each, but decided against it in the end after waiting for 40 minutes and seeing another couple being filmed and being asked to "be more excited" and to add in hand gestures. They just looked odd after that, and we decided a couple of free bottles of wine were not worth looking like idiots on TV in England!

It was then back to Auckland, where we met up with some Irish guys who we shared a dorm with in Queenstown. We ended up in a pub doing karaoke and as I walked in a guy came up to me and started insisting he recognised me from somewhere. I had no idea who he was and assumed it was a case of mistaken identity on his part, until he proclaimed "YOU WERE AT THE ZORBING PLACE!!" It turned out he had been watching his mate do the zorb and had obviously seen me watching James do his. He tried to persuade me to take part in the karaoke and despite me politely declining, the next thing I knew he had written on a piece of paper "zoe" and "any Spice Girls song". So half an hour later I was singing Who Do You Think You Are, and sending death stares to James and the Irish guys who hadn't hidden me when my name was called out, but instead pointed and shouted "she's over there!"

We haven't been up to much in Auckland, as the weather is rather rainy. We have been up the Sky Tower though and admired the views and got very wet from walking in the rain.

Think I've written enough now.