After leaving Chile on the evening of 28th May we arrived in New Zealand on the morning of 30th May, having only a 13 hour flight. Try working that one out?! Apparantly we crossed over the international date line which meant that we lost a whole day of our lives up there in the air somewhere. Which is very confusing.

I was really sad to be leaving South America as I had loved it there and could have quite happily stayed there for our whole 5 months away. We had to leave though, and though I don't think New Zealand will live up to my time in South America we are having a great time so far.

We landed in Auckaland and spent out first 3 days there, didn't get upto much here, just your average city, but was so wierd to see all the brands we were used to from home and all the same shops and food chains (although Santiago was the fast food capital of South America!). We took a tour of the city and learnt quite a lot as I don't think that any of us had realised that New Zealand had so much history,a nd it's all really interesting.

We couldn't decide whether to hire a campervan but after someone pointed out it was getting to NZ winter and we are all pretty whimpy it would probably be too cold we opted for hiring a car for a 4 week road trip round NZ.

We drove upto The Bay of Islands which is north of Auckland and luckily got some really nice weather while we were there. The water around NZ is all gorgeous, makes me wnat to sail off somewhere. Most places seem to have a limit of spending 2, 3 days at the most without running out of things to do.

After about 8 hours of driving we arrived in our current location - Rotorua. Today we went to a Mau ori village. The Mau ori culture is really interesting to hear about. We saw concert where they showed traditional games, songs and dancing, it was really amazing. The village also had hot mud pools, and springs which unfortunately you are not allowed in, though we were tempted. And a guyser which we saw erupt a couple of times that was pretty cool. Tomorrow think we're going to look into zorbing. Next stop Taupo for some sky diving and maybe Hawkes Bay to sample some more wine!