A round up of the rest of the North Island, NZ

After the Bay of Islands I was fairly chilled and looking forward to the rest of my Kiwi Experience.... i just had to get through one more night of boredom in Auckland.. which as you guessed wasn't my favourite place in the world..

I'll keep this as short and sweet as i can, as i have been told I utter bollox every now and then....

From the wonderful Auckland I missioned to a place called Mercury Bay. This is a scenic place which allows 360' views of the city, pretty nice indeed. It is also the home of the Coramandel Peninsula, which for those of you going to see narnia in the cinema, is the opening scene. It is absolutely stunning, postcard material. I stayed here in a fairly nice hostel for the night before heading to Rotorua.

Rotorua is an awesome place, but it stinks. It is the most active of areas in NZ in the way of volcanoes and plate movement. The smell is natural and smells quite frankly of turd, because of the sulphur being released from the earth. You walk down the street and the earth is steaming, and there are natural hot springs all over the shop, its pretty cool! Here i did some lueging down a cliff, lueging for those not aware is a sort of go-kart come sledge, no motor, just gravity! its quick and pretty good fun. My Irish mate Mick stacked it off the cliff and cut his head up, pretty ausing stuff! We also went to a Mouri evening (NZ tribe) which put on the most awesome food, cooked traditionally in the ground, was darn nice and the first proper meal on my trip, also they taught us the HAKA tribal dance, was cooooool.... i stayed here a night at a rather ropey hostel... b4 hitting Waitomo for a night (not a lot to say about Waitamo, i did black water rafting here which was great fun, it takes you far far underground through caves, and you have a rubber ring and your wits to stop you getting stuck in tight spaces and washed off water falls..... they make you sign 2 disclaimers before you do this... thats how i measure its dangerousness,  you only sign one for the skydive! we did some cave diving and cliff diving which was fun. Next stop was Taupo.

Taupo is coolio. My bus pals went off to sit around and wait patiently... and nervously to see if they could do a skydive here (wather was shit and there was a backlog from the previous day). They want to do it here cos they are all cheap skates, there isn't much scenery here like mountains or anything, but its the cheapest place to jump from a plane, me personally, i am waiting for Frans Joseph as my lonely planet says to! I wandered off with a few germans and french guys and girls, and a fellow Pomme and walked towards a natural hot spring we were going to swim in. We walked past the bungy and thought sod it i'll do it, none of my fellow new chums were game which added to my desire to achieve... 47m off a cliff into clear blue water (look Taupo bungy up in youtube to get an idea of someone elses jump). I did it and had a grin on my face for the rest of the day, roll on Queenstown and the Nevis!! Stayed in Taupo for a few days and did my washing and chilled as the rain kept-a-coming, but i didn't mind. Next stop was river valley to do white water rafting on a grade 5 river. Was cool but an uneventful place to discuss anything further! after that the next stop is Wellington.

Wellington is nice. I got very drunk with my fellow traveller Matt here. It is here we met 3 girls and a welsh guy travelling together, absolute nutters who know how to drink. So much so that i missed the coach to the ferry the next day.. and they didn't... luckily the ferry port was 20 mins away and the coach left an hour and a half before the ferry did, so i got up, still drunk as hell and missioned on public transport to the ferry terminal, then ran as fast as my alcohol induced legs would take me.... i was the last passenger on board before it left 15 seconds later... i met up with the possy again and chilled out to amazing views for 3 hours, was amazing!

Roll ont he South Island!!!!!!!!!!!