Kia Ora!!!

Kate here! We've made it to New Zealand!

Well our visit to NZ started with a lot of sleeping I hate to report! After Katie wrote the last blog we attempted (although didn't manage) to sleep at the airport in Melbourne to save money on a night's accommodation and as a result we ended up arriving in Auckland VERY tired! After catching up on about 11 hours of sleep though we were ready to start our Kiwi Experience!

After spending a couple of very COLD days in Auckland, and deciding that there wasn't anything very interesting to do that was free we caught our first bus to Paihia (The Bay of Islands) which is situated at the very top of the North island. It was very pretty up here although very windy and cold!

Next it was back to Auckland for the night before catching the bus to Mercury Bay. After travelling all day on the bus and visiting one of the most beautiful beaches we were struck with our first bit of bad luck! Our bus broke down in the middle of nowhere for three and a half hours and all 50 people on the bus had to be transported to our hostel in groups of 9 in a mini bus! It took quite a while so as a good will gesture the company put on a $400 bar tab for us last night! - Not bad eh!

After Mercury Bay we travelled to Rotorua and on the way had a walk through some old gold mines - very nice apart from we didn't find any gold! At Rotorua we went to an evening Maori show to try and get a bit cultural. Rotorua has a very distinctive 'eggy' smell as there's sulphur underneath the land as a result of past volcanic activity and in some parts of the town are sulphur pools which are warm mud pools which bubble. It was very strange but interesting wandering around the park and seeing natural mud pools which were smoking!

The next day it was off to Waitomo and on the way we stopped at 'the sheep show' which is a popular comedy farm show for tourists. As you can imagine it featured all the different species of sheep they have in NZ, a cow and sheep dogs!

In Waitomo we went black water rafting which was an experience! this involved climbing in to a cave in freezing cold water with a black floating tyre, once inside the cave you got to see glowworms rooted in the ceiling and walls of the caves and we went rafting inside the caves in the rubber rings. It was a bit scary at first, but once we'd got used to the darkness and cold water we had fun.

The next morning we set off for Taupo and on the way saw another weird sight - rabbit shearing!! These were giant white rabbits that needed to be sheared every 3 months due to the speed at which their hair grows!

To finish the day off we arrived at Taupo for our most exciting experience yet! - we threw ourselves out of a plane at 15,000ft by doing a skydive!! I really enjoyed it and i think none of us really had time to get nervous!! We are now resting for a day in Taupo before heading off on a bus tomorrow to River Valley and then it's off to the country's capital Wellington on Tuesday!!

So that's all our news for the moment, hope you are all ok!

Lots of love

Kate and Katie xxxxxxxxxxxxxx