Blogs from Mangere, Auckland, North Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 2

Ahhh... what a way to start a holiday!! Sitting by the window, comfy seats, bubbles, sun shining down. Absolute relaxation!!! Well, here we are! Waiting for our flight to Christchurch to start our long-awaited journey through the South Island. A land I have never truly seen and one which Renee last visited properly in her early teens. Could we have picked a more stunning destination than our own country? Nah, I don't think so. And certainly not at this time of year. 21 days of absolute bliss, going at our own pace, booking only as we need to and otherwise relaxing in our own 5-star camper! We have already come up with our first game of the trip.... "Slap-A-Camper!". This game works very similar to "Punch Buggy" or "Free-Hit - Fire Hydrant" in that when one ... read more

Kia Ora, hello in Maori from Aotearoa "the land of the long white cloud" Maori for New Zealand. We had only 44 days to explore in our Explore More Campervan the North then by ferry to the South islands. As usual its been a bit of a rush although we tried to prolong our stops sometimes to 4 days to give us a chance to really feel culture. What we discovered was that on the map distances were not far but in reality the roads can be windy and steep meaning a slower journey more so on the coastal areas of both islands. We were here for the summer holidays which brought more traffic/kiwi families out to camp,do water sports,fishing etc. So driving a small but heavy Campervan was tricky with the traffic and slow. We ... read more

New Zealand The flight from Oz to NZ was great. I was lined up hoping that the travel agent hadn't stuffed up my booking when it came to my turn to be scanned and allowed onto the plane. I slid my ticket under the laser and was greeted with a completely different and extremely worrying sound from the scanner. The friendly hostess casually escorted me out of the line and over to an enormous man mountain who had less neck than a frog. He looked at my ticket with a frown and started punching away at the computer without telling me what I had done wrong. I looked around at the line and the last passenger was nearly boarding. Finally, he looked up from the computer with a big smile, said "All good mate", and handed ... read more

Sunday, May 16th We've decided to start attending church again. Without realizing it we'd become separated from other believers and were starting to have a tough time with our faith. We'd been told by a few people that Doxa Deo had established a campus in Manukau, only 14km from where we're camping. After visiting their website we found that the morning service is in Afrikaans. To be honest, we were a little skeptical about attending an Afrikaans service. We'd not exactly had a good history with Afrikaans churches in SA, but this is a Doxa Deo campus and in the past we've always enjoyed their English services. When we arrived we found that the congregation was fairly small, so there was no chance of slipping in unnoticed. We'd hardly sat down before pastor Karel Botha came ... read more