Merry late Christmas and Happy New year!!!

List of things we have learnt about ourselves
1. We do not share (no big surprise there)! There is not one little sharing bone in our bodies, and we especially do not share sleeping facilities with strangers.
2. We do not plan (again no surprise there). Planning is for organized people, and lets face it were never that organized.

Well hello!!! No, no we haven’t died (although there have been some close calls, what with the evil seagulls and all) or been eaten by Kiwis or anything! We just haven’t been able to find an internet place that didn’t charge a ridiculous amount of money for a bit of time on the internet!
But enough excuses. Lets see we left off last time right after the lovely last dinner for Kakada, and the following night out… We got pretty drunk, its hard not to, when beer buckets are only 300 bath, so the day after was spent sleeping and watching TV for the most part. In the evening we went to dinner with Sharan, Jamie, The Irish, Isabel and Lucie, the only ones left in Bangkok of our group. It was a bit sad, but we might actually meet up with a couple of them while were here in NZ.
At this point we had had enough of sightseeing so our last full day in Bangkok was spent in a humongous shopping center. We just power shopped our way through shop after shop, only stopping for food breaks. They also had a very impressive cinema on the top floor of the building, so we also went to the movies. That was a rather curious experience, right in the middle of the commercials this song start playing, and all the little Thai people get up. And there we sat wondering what the blip was going on for a while, then suddenly the speakers said long live the king, and our movie started… It was odd!!! But the movie was great!!!
Next day we checked out at 12.00 and got a cap to the airport… We were there half an hour later, and our plane wasn’t scheduled to leave until 19.50, so we had to spent eight freaking hours at the airport!! We will spare you the boring details, but trust us there is not a duty free store at Bangkok airport that we haven’t seen!!

We arrived in Auckland the next afternoon, and after a couple of customs had starred us down for a couple of minutes and washed Tuzs hiking boots, we were allowed into New Zealand.
We spent about 10 days in Auckland, looking at cars, and waiting for the freaking bankpersonel to start working again after Christmas, so we could buy a car… Seriously people should never be allowed to go on holiday when we need something done.
Oh and by the way, we had a lovely Christmas. On the 24th we built a Christmas tree out of straws we had stolen in a Starbucks, and Tuz made rice pudding, and we had bought each other some insanely expensive t-shirts in Bangkok and a new haircut as our Christmas gifts… Grand! The 25th we went to a Christmas dinner at the hostle we stayed at. It was great they served alcohol and they fed us so we had a grand old time!! It was very different from home but all in all it was not to bad!
On the 31st of December we were finally able to buy our car and head out onto the open road!!
Here follows the account of SerenityFalcon said car we bought:
Yes we named our car SerenityFalcon, to pay homage to two of the greatest spaceships, that have ever sailed through the ´verse. It is a 1993 Toyota Lucida (for those of you who are familiar with Tuzs moms car, it looks almost exactly like that), and it likes to drink 91 petrol!!! Yup we totally figured that out on our own… or not! Anyway it has a bed in the back and we are mostly able to fit into it. It is not as messy as one might have thought, what with us living in it! She has a couple of odd little quirks, like sometimes the the rear thingiemagic, that you can open and that wont hold itself up, locks on its own, and when we drive the engine makes a slight tingly noise. It is better than the highpitched screechy sound she made at one point whenever we hit 2300 rounds… That stopped after we almost reversed her over a Cliffside, but that will come later… And besides if your car dosent make a funny noise when you drive it, you are so NOT in the in club, and then you cant sit on the back of the bus with all the cool kids! Besides it passed its W.O.F. test without marks!! HA HA at den Mikael… she’s a good car… We love her… most days, not so much when it rains.

Well on with the story. So once we had paid for our car, and the people who sold it to us had managed to find it, someone had put it in storage and forgot to mention it, we were able to hit 1a, the northbound road out of Auckland, also known as Roadkill Avenue. Okay so we hadn’t really planned to go that way, or as far as we did that first day, but it had been months since Tuz had last driven and Trine cant really navigate, so we mostly screamed our way north (Eight lane motorways should be banned by the way!!), untill we found a picknick area just south of Whangarei where we spent the night. Wuhuu greatest New Years Eve ever, sleeping under a towel right next to the highway. The next morning, after a very unrest full night, people in NZ apparently don’t celebrate new years, because there were cars driving past us all trough the night, we headed into Whangarei, with a lot less screaming than the night before, and found a Tourist Info Center. And so begins our road trip adventure of NZ. After having hung around in Whangarei for a bit, we decided that a clock museum really wasn’t our kind of thing, so we headed north on Roadkill Avenue towards Kerikeri, stopping along the way in Kawakawa, for the worlds awsomest public toilet. Seriously there is nothing like it, it is freaking hilarious, as we stod outside waiting our turn, we contemplated the benefits of paying one of the many men walking in and out of mens room to take pictures of said room. However, we decided that we didn’t much fancy having to explain that to the police, or even worse the personell at the looney bin, and therefore abandoned said idea. After our very cultural stop at the public restroom, we went to see the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, the birthplace of the sovereign nation of New Zealand. It was a nice little museum, and once we told the lady we were from Denmark, she promptly handed us a guide booklet in Dutch… They do that a lot here, assume that we speak Dutch, we don’t get it, people from Holland speak dutch not us!!! Sigh.
Upon arriving in Kerikeri, we found out that the entire town had decided to close shop early because it was Friday, so we just drifted around town for a while, and then decided to eat dinner at a nice restaurant, you know to celebrate New Years. Or at least, that was we told ourselves. The next day we saw a cute little old store that sold 18th century replica stuff, but otherwise decided that it was time to move on… Yes 3 second attention span strikes again! Mmuhahaha! We decided to head for Doubtless Bay, thinking it would be nice with some beach time. However the Campground (apparently the freedom camping rule has been revoked sometime within the last 7 years, typical!!) was filled with families with small children, and the water was really, really cold! Okay not by Danish standards, but we have just been in Cambodia where the water is boiling at the edges, so the water here is freaking freezing in comparison. Anyway because of large quantity of hell-hobbits at the campsite we decided to make a run for it the day after we arrived. We headed towards Kaitaia, were we ended up spending 3 days. Although it was involuntary, our car needed to be W.O.Fed (I just wanted to say that it passed it without remarks) and everything was closed when we arrived, so it took an extra day.
It did however, enable us to go on a great little bustour up to Cape Reianga with our lovely bus driver Bobby the Bard of Death. He sang lovely Maori songs and told us nice little stories, all of which ended in tragic death for the people involved, while we cruised along the 90 Mile Beach up to the cape. The tour included sandtobagging in the dunes, which was freaking awesome, and a nice little lunch stop at a beach, where we were attacked by vicious and evil seagulls. They slowly surrounded us while we were eating our sandwiches, and only due to the heroic efforts of Bobby the Bard of Death are we still here today.
Once we had our little sticker in our windshield saying we were, at least mechanically fit to be driving on the roads (I am not sure whether we ourselves are fir to be driving), we headed towards Matahoke, stopping along the way at Tronsons Kauri Park. It is a nice little bushwalk, that takes you past several examples of the Kauri tree, a large tree only grown in NZ.
In Matahoke we went to the Kauri museum. No, it is not a museum about trees, although they featured in the exhibit, but rather a museum about the pioneers in the Northland area.
After Matahoke we headed back down and past Auckland, to begin the next part of our journey through Coromandel and the volcanic highlands. That however is another story altogether, and since we do not want to be the cause of failing eyesight throughout both Denmark and the U.S., we will stop this little narration here. But fear not, we will be back soon, with more exiting tales, including the one where we nearly reversed poor Nettie (SerenityFalcon) over the side of a cliff, so stay safe.