Well we arrived in Masterton to visit Allison's Uncle Eddie and Jude.  Masterton is a really nice town, surrounded by farmland and mountains.  It was good to get a taste of real Kiwi life, as on our first day there we were welcomed with a few cold beers and a barbie, which most Kiwi's live on.  They like their meat! My uncle has his own courier's business, so we followed him on his daily postie run, which is all really picturesque. ...

After all the adventure in Taupo, we headed to Tongariro National Park. We wanted to complete a one-day trek called the Tongariro Crossing, we'd heard it was supposed to be brilliant. The walk started as a gentle gradient up a valley called Mangatepopo and then leads into a steep climb between 2 active volcanoes, MT Tongariro and MT Ngauruhoe (also known as MT Doom in the Lord Of The Rings). This was quite exhausting, but the scenery was amazing. We then wa...

The next morning we went jet boating by the Huka Falls in Taupo, known as the Hukajet. The Hukajet travels along the river at 80kph, and can turn 360 degrees on it's own length, whilst the driver skids along canyon walls and narrowly avoids trees. The boats have 8.2l Chevrolet V8 engines, so they're pretty nippy and a lot of fun. A nice way to wind down after our skydive yesterday, though apparently a few tourists have lost their heads leaning out to ta...

As soon as you land in New Zealand you are inundated with adverts for adventure activities. It's so in your face and it seems that just about everyone in the country has thrown themselves out of a plane. Sky diving was also one of the things that we really wanted to do when we came away, although as I'm not great with heights it was always uncertain. So until the day before the skydive Allison thought she was jumping by herself, as the only way I could fo...

So after missing the sunrise in Gisborne (after snoozing the alarm, but it looked pretty cloudy anyway), which is the first city in the world to see the sunrise, we drove on to Napier. Napier is a pretty, little town (well quite big in New Zealand terms) in Hawke's Bay, which was destroyed by an earthquake about 70 years ago and re-built in an art deco style. There is even an Irish pub which was shipped brick by brick to NZ after somebody fell in love with t...