After a freeezing night in the car, we were woken by day break & tucked into our breakfast feast of baguette & hummus. Once suitably stuffed, we set off to see the sights that Kaikoura had to offer. On the way we saw some wild seals on the rocks of the shore line & we stopped to watch them for a while, as they are pretty funny & cute. Kaikoura is well known for it's whale watching. There is a selection of sealife, due to an abrupt drop in ocean ...

Having picked up our lovely "rent-a-dent" Nissan Pulsar the day before we headed off early from Havelock North in order to catch the afternoon ferry from Wellington at the southern end of the north island. Arriving just in time after a 4 hour drive (including a pie stop of course) we got our tickets and to our delight, got $60 off for being students. The pies in New Zealand are plentiful and our pies of choice are steak and pepper and apple turnover (ye...

We took a 2 hr bus down from taupo to Hastings last night. There we met with my cousins George and Sammy as well as Sammys fiance David - them getting married is the main reason we're in NZ. We had some mexican food and caught up as I had not seen them in ages and maz had never met them. Today we've been updating this blog and planning our South Island trip and are picking up our rent-a-dent car at 4pm. It's a load cheaper/easier to hire budget cars here than i...

We have spent the past few days with Pedro's uncle Chris who lives in Taupo & he has been showing us some of the sights in the area. He has shown us loads in a small amount of time! We saw various places, such as Maori places, steaming craters, prawn farm, honey farm, played some mini gol, red woods and saw some sulphur lakes. As New zealand's North Island is basically a land of volcanoes, lots of steam constantly rises out of the ground caused by the hot l...

We arrived in Auckland at 05:30 this morning. We got a cheap bus straight to our hostel and managed to check in for 07:00!!! Awesome! It meant we could get straight to sleep and then wake up refreshed in time for lunch. Which is what we did. Walking around our local surroundings to get a feel for where we were. Our first impressions were that we were in some weird mix of England, Germany and Singapore. We sat down in a food court and ate a Thai green curry and a...