After a bit of a lie in, we packed up and set off for our final stop in New Zealand, Auckland. As we had already spent some time there before over Christmas, there wasn't much we wanted to see. We had initially planned to do some more booking and planning in the library but they were all shut due to the New Years public holidays which they have until the 4th Jan. On arriving in Auckland, we parked up and did a little stock up of items we were running low on for...

Feeling refreshed, we made our way further south towards Auckland. We didn't really want to spend two full days in Auckland as there wasn't all that much there that we wanted to see or do. On route, we came across a coastal town called Waipu. As the weather was pretty good, we decided to stop for lunch at Waipu cove beach and spend a few hours sunning ourselves. The beach was stunning, it went on for as far as I could see, it must have been miles long! The sea ...

We woke feeling a tad hungover but not too bad! After making a cooked breakfast at the campsite, we packed up ready to go. The weather was a little overcast so we decided to head down to Paihia town centre to see what was on. Whilst on the ferry yesterday, we passed a town on one of the bays called Russell. It looked very quaint and interesting so we decided to visit there for the day. After a short ferry ride of 15 minutes, we were walking onto the wooden jetty...

It was a gorgeous sunny New Years Eve morning! We made ourselves a quick breakfast of tea and toast and packed up a picnic ready for our day out. We parked the car in an all day free space (which are so rare in NZ) and made our way to the ferry port! We purchased a 35 dollar return ticket to Urupukapuka island which was suppose to have a great snorkelling area. The ferry took 40 minutes to get to the island whilst passing through many different beautiful island...

It was a beautiful fresh and sunny morning! We were hoping to see a little more of what Whangareri had to offer before heading onto the Bay of Islands for our stay over New Years. I had a feeling the campsites may well be pretty busy so we thought maybe we should try book one sooner rather than later. Thank god we did as we tried 2 campsites which were already full, one had availability but wanted 160 dollars, and we managed to nab the last space for two nights a...