17 time zones later....

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Day 95
9th December

If anything happened on the 8th December, we missed it! That was a bizarre experience, we had taken off from Santiago on the 7th and now it was 6.00am on the 9th! The world is a big place. It was very strange to be back in the English speaking world again. Ellory ended up asking a woman where the toilets were in Spanish and got very embarrassed when she apologised and said she didn’t understand him! I then got confused in the toilets as I wondered where the bin was to throw toilet paper in! Oh dear, think we were a little tired!

We got our entrance stamps to New Zealand without any problems, however when it came through to customs we hit a problem. NZ is very strict on not having any foreign soil etc come into the country, which is fair enough. We’d declared our boots as we’d been working at La Senda Verde and our passports obviously told the story that we’d been in South America. No problem they said, we’ll just clean them. We thought this was pretty cool, our boots were pretty dirty! We got them back in plastic bags and got the shuttle bus from the airport to the centre of Auckland. We checked into our hostel, Base Auckland, and this is when we actually looked at the boots. The sods have stabbed all the way through the soles of Ellory’s boots and they were completely useless! Mine were ok, although they had taken a bit of rubber from the soles. We were pretty cross, if they were unsafe to come into the country they should have told us and we would have said they could chuck them!

Our first day in Auckland, we didn’t do too much. Had a little wander around and managed to find marmite and ribena, Ellory was very excited, we’d really missed those things while we’d been in S.America! However the fact we’d spent over 18 hours on planes the day before meant we were exhausted and very jet lagged and therefore we fell asleep at the grand old time of 4.30pm. Rock and Roll!!!

Love Liz xxx

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