Travel Blog: New Zealand

7th December - Auckland

Auckland is built on 40 volcanoes, so we fully intended to climb one whilst in the city. Mount Eden in fact, which is the tallest.  But, for the first time, the weather has turned against us. The rain poured and poured, on our only full day here. (It actually turned out to be a tornado not too far away)! So I'm afraid all we ended up doing was wandering round a free art gallery for a while and hanging around our hostel.  Even in an 8 bed dorm it was one of the nicer stays we've had! And it's dawned on me that we're leaving soon, flying back to Aus and hopefully back to the Sun...my tan has almost faded completely!

But I feel like I did when I left Thailand...ready to chain myself to the nearest thing and scream I'm not going!! The kiwis are the nicest people you could ever, ever meet and I really am going to miss being called "bro" and "mate." There's also so much we haven't had chance to see and do...many people tell us the best places are Queenstown and Bay of Islands, neither of which we visited! I'm definitely coming back while we're on this side of the world.

Saying that, it's going to be soooo nice to set up base somewhere for longer than 3 days!! Unpack our backpacks, wash our clothes when we want...it really is exciting stuff.  And we need to find jobs pronto, as we have spent FAR too much money on our 5 weeks on the road. So, as we're going to be in the same country for a while now I decided to compile some statistics:

Countries visited : 4
Air miles travelled : 13,998
Time spent on planes: 28.5
Time spent on trains: 13 (in 1 journey all at once)
Time spent on coaches: 44.5
Stop- offs, islands, towns etc: 14
Free Emirates alcohol units consumed: too many to count
Souvenirs bought: too many to count
Blog posts: 19
Photographs taken: 837
Mcdonald's consumed: 4
Hair frizz-o-meter: 4 (much better than predicted, think it's because I don't have a hairdryer)
Arguments: NONE!! (Rik needs an award)

The journey is far from over, this is just a good milestone for these facts. We still have a year's worth of adventures in Australia,  and it's a huge country so lots to see. In the upcoming posts I'll be writing about life on an Aussie working holiday visa...
Thanks for reading about my travels so far :) x