Hello All,

We hope you are well. Since our last blog we have done quite abit. From Rotorua we headed to lake taupo and did a 15,000ft sky dive, definately better than the Bungee, even steph did it this time although ti took some persuading...maybe Rob should quit winding her up about plummeting to her death more often.

From Taupo we headed south west to the volcanoes ( their names escape me at teh moment) that were used to film MOrdor in the lord of the rings. We spent a few days there doing some wlks and enjoying the amazing scenery. From here we heade east to New Plymouth for the night. NOt much to report but the drive around anouth magnificent volcanoe was worth the trip.

The next day we went to Waitomo to see the cave they have there. We did abit of caving, which involved abseiling int the cavve, tubing down the river that flowed in the cave and then seeing the amazing glow worms that inhabit them, it was a realy good trip, except the guide was a bit of a dick.

From here we headed to the far north to the Bay of Islands. This is a very pretty area very simialr to the Abel tasman park in the south island. We did a day cruise around here seeing many Dolphins. We had hoped to do some swimming with them but they had young in the pods so we were´t allowed. Very dissapointed. Hopefully we can do some dolphin swimming in South America somewhere!

After spending a couple of days here we drove further north to Matai Bay. It´s an amazing beach thart couold rival many that we have seen in thailand. We spent the night here topping up the tans before heading south again to Auckland.

We spent 4 days in the city, which is very nice, but like many NZ cities, isn´t really that big. We managed to catch up with a couple of friends here. One was Neil(Jubbly) who we did a bit of pub crawl around the city centre with. Steph over did it and Rob had to take her home. This is an absolute change from the usual program where steph takes Rob home after he falls asleep at the bar. Rob of course will never let steph forget the sacrifice he made that night.

We also manged to meet up with a friend from our Africa tour, Heather. Meeting up with her was great and had nothing to do with the fact she had a pool in her back garden, but it definately helped.

We flew from Auckalnd to Santiago in a 12 hour flight and then had an 8 hour layover at the airport, then a 4 hour flight to Lima, Peru..we were pretty tired as you can imagine and having to deal with a new language after no sleep for 36 hrs was a trying time, particularly for our pick up taxi who couldn´t understand a single word of the spanish we had learned. Nevermind, we manged to get to our hotel safely.

We spent the next few days going around Lima. It´s a pretty busy city. The Old centre is very nice with some vey beautiful plaza´s and churches and Barranco is the Bohemian part with some great bars in it ( guess which part we enjoyed the most!). We weren´t too sure what to expect with SA. From all the internet stuff we had read it appeared that Lima would be like a war zone with dangers at every turn. In fact we found the taxi drivers to be very helpful and polite and the general public very nice indeed.

After a few days here we headed to Cusco. We´ve been here 3 days now aclimatising to teh altitude, which literaly takes your breath away. This a very beautiful city, some great inca buildings and some nice reatuarants. Its very simialr inatmosphere and history as say Luang Prabang and Hoi An are and we both like it here.

We´ve been drinking plenty of Coca tea to cope with the altitude and so far we are OK. We head out on to the Inca Trail tomorrow for 4 days to head to Macchu Picchu and we are looking forward to it alot..

Anyway. Take care everyone. Hope you are Ok and coping with the New year BLues.

Speak soon Rob and Steph xxx