Kate: Home Sweet Home!!!! Well kind of... We made it and to be honest it still hasn't really all sunk in that we are in Auckland and this is it for the next 2 years! Yikes. It is so great here though and both Steve and i are already feeling pretty settled in our new flat- now all we need is some friends!! I was so shocked how quickly and easily we managed to find our flt. We were so lucky that we took the first one we saw. It is on a great location, right in the CBD and next [View Full Entry]

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Steve: Fiji!!! A perfect place to finish our trip before NZ and a return to work and relatively normal live. We arrived at 5.15am from LA pretty tired after the long flight and having lost 2 days to the international date line. We were able to check in really early to our hostel at Smugglers Cove in Nadi which was great and sit on our balcony and see the sun come up. The hostel was really nice with a great restaurant and really nice rooms. The weather was perfect, its winter in Fiji at the moment so the temp is only [View Full Entry]

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Steve - Before heading to Fiji we had to head back up to LA for a couple of nights before getting our connecting flight on. This meant a really long day of travel and we did not get into LA until late. We had decided to stay in Santa Monica as it was one place we hadn't really seen well the first time around and we also figured it would be nice to stay by the beach. We had booked a cheap motel online the day before as we didn't get in until 11pm but we had no idea what it [View Full Entry]

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Steve: Our next stop was Arequipa, the second largest city in Peru. It is also next near to Colca Canyon, which is apparently the deepest canyon in the world and also the home of the Andean Condor. Arequipa is a really nice city and more similar to Cuzco than Lima with a really nice Centre and plenty of nice bars and restaurants. We splashed out on the hotel as it is our last stop which we proably shouldn´t but it wasn´t that expensive really and it was very comfortable with large rooms. The first morning we spent looking around the city [View Full Entry]

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Kate - We did another overnight journey to get to our next destination Puno where the famous Lake Titicaca lies. The journey was probably our worst yet!! I think we knew it was going to be a killer when we were the only ´gringos´ on the bus and every Peruvian that got on the bus was carrying at least 2-3 blankets with them and we we didnt even have our jackets on. Needless to say the 7 hour journey was FREEZING!!!! We managed to huddle together and get a little sleep- i think it helped that we were so exhausted from [View Full Entry]

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Steve - So the time had come - the Inca Trail! I know Kate had been worrying about this for about 6 months and now the talking was over! I knew very little about it before hand prefering to ignore everything written about it so that it would all be a surprise. All i knew was that it was 45km walk through the mountains ending at Machu Picchu (the lost city of the Incas and one of the 7 wonders of the world). We had heard it was pretty tough but were not quite sure how tough. The night before we [View Full Entry]

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Steve - Our next short stop was Ica, this was just for the day as we had a night bus booked for the evening to take us up to Cuzco. We booked an afternoon of dune bugeying and sandboarding which i think Kate was secretly dreading. We got there early and we were able to spend the day at a local hostel which had a pool so we got a bit of tanning in! Early afternoon we got picked up by out driver and off we went in this bugey. It was brilliant much better than any rollercoaster. The dunes ar [View Full Entry]

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Kate - Our next stop was Cuzco a city in southeastern Peru near the Urubamba valley of the Andes mountain range. It is a gorgeous city surrounded by beautiful mountains and picturesque architecture. The journey from Ica was a long 16 hours but was actually not too bad. We did the over night journey and by the time we had watched a couple of rubbish films on the bus and slept for about 8 hours we had almost arrived. Cuzco really is a beautiful city and we decided to get there a good 3 days before we stared the Inca Trail [View Full Entry]

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Kate - After such a wonderful time in Lima with Treeve and his family we decided to head down the coast to Pisco. When we arrived it was quite sad to see how much damage the recent earthquake had caused with so many building falling down and big gaps in the street where building once existed- i didn´t even know there was an earthquake-doh!. We stayed in another really nice hostel and booked up some tours to do. We decided on a full days touring starting with a boat trip to the Isle de Ballenas and then off to the the [View Full Entry]

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Steve - The flight to Lima was pretty short which was nice and we got there early afternoon. It was a short ride to Miraflores our base in Lima in a taxi but pretty mental. The roads are crazy! There are no rules and the air is filled constantly with the sound of horns. They don´t seem to know how to use their mirrors so they constantly beep so people know they are there. Taxis beep you to see if you want to be picked up, cars beep to acknowledge one another, they beep if you drive badly, beep if you [View Full Entry]

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