Hi

I havent added to the blog for a while because our last 2 weeks in New Zealand have been pretty uneventful due to bad weather and therefore road closures (due to avalanche risk) and boat cancelations. However although most boats were cancelled, the captain of our ferry from the South Island to the North Island was a determined little guy and kept our boat going! We therefore dosed ourselves up on sea sickness pills and got on. The first part of the journey was fine because we were sheltered by lots of little islands. However about an hour into the trip a lady announced that we would soon be hitting open water and could we all please hold on! Lots of staff then went around bolting the doors open and clearing the bar of breakables! As soon as we hit the "open water" the boat was flung up and down like a fair ground ride. Initially everone was taking pictures and enjoying themselves. But after about 20 mins, one by one, people started to stop taking photos and grab there sick bags! Me and kirsty just sat down and truned our Ipods up so we couldnt here the wretching noises! After 5.5hours it was all over and I am proud to say neither of us was sick!


We arrived in Lima today after a 12 hour flight to Santiago, a night in a very nice hotel (thanks dad) and then another 4 hours on a plane from Santiago to Lima.

We are going to start our tour on Saturday so I will probably have more to write after that.

Its now over half way into our trip in New Zealand and it has been non stop fun. We wont bore you with a massive blog. The highlights have been:

- Jumping out of a plane at 15, 000 feet

- Trekking through Lord of the Rings country

- Nearly breaking every bone in our body whilst snowboarding!

- Jumping the second highest bungee jump in the world (it was actually the highest when I did it beacause the one in South Africa was closed)

- Ice climbing and Helihiking over a glacier

- Making our own knife!

- Bathing in natural hot springs

And there is so much more that we would have loved to have done, but could not afford!

The bad news is that the lovely people at Kumuka decided to cancel our trip to South America with 3 weeks notice! Our last week has therefore been a bit of a nightmare, trying to sought out what we are going to do for the next 8 weeks. I think we finally soughted it out today, but it is going to cost us an extra 400 quid each. NEVER book a trip with Kumuka. I phoned them up to complain and the lady on the end of the phone just said "thats what insurance is for!" How cheeky is that! We have sent an email to complain today.

Anyway, that hasnt ruined our trip and we hope to spend the next couple of weeks swimming with dolphins and viewing amazing scenery at Milford Sound.

Hope all is well at home. Let us know any news.

We have been in New Zealand for an action packed 8 days now.
We arrived in Auckland last week and started a tour of the North Island with a company called Stray Travel. Since then it has been non-stop activities!

On our first day we drove to a place called Hai Hei and dug some holes in the sand on a beach to find hot springs to bath in! The water was really really hot, and we could only sit in it for a few seconds! That evening we went down to the beach again to look at the glow in the dark shrimps that were being washed up onto the beach... there were millions of them!

The second day was spent at the 'surf capital of New Zealand', Raglan. The hostel we stayed in had a surf school attached to it so I got 2 hours of surf lessons with a few more people from our bus. The lessons really helped and within 10 mins I was riding my first wave standing up! We both really liked it there so we decided to stay another night with a few friends that we met on the way. The next day was spent surfing again but in the evening we went into the woods to watch glow worms and to play on the zip wire in the pitch black!

For our fourth day we drove to a place called Rotorua, where we got to do black water rafting and caving through a kilometer of caves. We spent 5 hours in the caves; squeezing through tiny gaps, floating in rapids and swimming through caves where the water (which was really really chillyoli!)was only about 3cm from the roof! It was great experience although we were freezing by the end! After the caving we drove to our hostel, which had natural geo-thermal spa pools in, and spent the evening at a Maouri cultural evening. This was a real laugh even though all the guys had to get up on stage and perform the Haka (All Blacks dance) for all the girls! This wouldnt have been so bad if there wasnt only 3 guys and 15 girls! However after a few drinks for Dutch courage we all got up and did it with all the facial expressions such as bulging eyes and tongue poking!

Today we have arrived in a place called Taupo where we are going to be staying for a few days. Tomorrow we hope to do a sky dive over a lake the size of Singapore! Then we want to do a walk through active volcanos and Mount Doom from The Lord Of The Rings, although all the roads around here are closed at the moment because of heavy snow fall so we are not sure when we can do this.