Auckland

30th September

Final short flight of our outward journey ended with unpacking half our bags to drag out the tent for inspection! NZ takes their biosecurity very seriously, with signs, dogs and scanners everywhere! A quick hop in our rental car landed us at Pete, Diana, Rebi, Holly & Harry’s house (Holly & Harry may have been of the 4 legged woofing variety….)  We settled for a night of views, beer and learning Hungarian animal names.

1st October

Day 1 of NZ exploration took us to Duders Reguonal park for a walk, tipped off with Eddie rolling down a hill. Great start to the NZ walking adventure! Topped off with Cadam cooking a fully British (apart from the NZ meat) toad in the hole, and riding around on Pete’s quadbike.

2nd October

Day of faff. It actually took us the whole day to trade our rental car for our campervan and get little Eddie’s poorly bottom seen by a doctor.

3rd October

Back in action! Auckland in a day, Train into downtown, first taste of L&P (liquid sherbet lemons!), ferry across the bay to Rangitoto island to walk up a Volcano! At just 600 years old, we explored the newest lava tubes we’d ever been to. We spent a lot of time ferreting around some obscure pathside holes and encouraging lots of others to follow, before realising that 5 minutes further on the path you stomped through a massive lava tube.

Back in Auckland we climbed the SkyTower for a view and an icecream. Turns out all of north island’s trains had been knocked out for the afternoon, so it was a wise decision to stay for that icecream.

We ended up spending a lot longer in Auckland than we had expected, due to the amazing hospitality of Pete, Diana and Rebi! We couldn’t have hoped for a better start to our NZ adventure.