Sweet as....

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Hi, folks,

A belated and possibly brief (it seldom is whenever I say that) entry into the bloglist this time to tie off our activities in New Zealand's North Island.
We arrived in Wellington (a.k.a Windy Welly) in the afternoon after a four hour crossing from Picton on a recycled Portsmouth to Cherbourg ferry (they couldn't even be bothered to properly paint over the signs) and headed to yet another 'free'campsite near the river Hutt (yet another Lord of the Rings filming site). The following day we set about fixing up the van and, with the help of an afternoon scrambling over other backpacker vans that had finally met their end in 'Pick a part'we had to spanking new tyres and a sparkly new grill.
Later that night we met up with the only other member of the Africa truck members still travelling, Claire, and had a lovely evening catching up, watching the All Blacks crush the Italians in the world cup and generally drinking far too much.
After fixing Claire's TV the following day and meeting up with a very strange group (but exceedingly nice none-the-less) from the Rosemere's backpackers we headed out into the centre of the island, taking in Old St. Peter's church and Kaihote Regional Park on the way.
We spent the coldest night in the van so far on the outskirts of the Tongariro national park before heading out to attempt the Tongariro crossing the next morning. Unfortunately we were informed that buses were not operating to ferry people from one side of the 8 KM, cross volcano, trek back to the start and we'd need crampons and ice axes if we wanted to attempt it anyway. Instead we opted for the short course up to the springs and back which afforded us some cool shots of the volcanoes and Mordor (from LOTR).
Heading north we stopped off at the Wai-o-tapu thermal wonderland to check out the mud pools and colourful waters but were nowhere near ready for the evilness of the stench there! Pegs firmly on our noses and photo's taken we headed through Rotorua (again a very smelly place indeed) through Hamilton and arrived at our final destination, Auckland. That night we managed to get very, very cheap tickets to see snow patrol play at the vector arena, which was pretty awesome.
Having already advertised our van we got there with 20 odd people ready to view it and offer us silly amounts of money for it. To make things fair we arranged a mass viewing on the Saturday with a blind auction.
A very boring but amusing day later and we had a winning bid of $4000 ($1800 more than we were asking!) and, after another boring morning suffering a pointless mechanical check over (which missed an obviously holey and blowing exhaust for a start) we were suddenly vanless. The extra cash, however, more than making up for witnessing England's pathetic performance against the springboks (the profit on the van a clear $2500!)
The following week we conspired to spend a stupid amount of money at the doctors getting our Typhoid boosters, an even stupider amount of money sending a behemouth parcel back to my folks and met up with Jason Philips (eventually), one of Linz´s friends from Uni, for a drink at lunch time.
After bumming around not really doing very much we finally waved farewell to New Zealand with firm expectations of a return some day and headed over to the air port where, after taking off at 5:35 P.m. on the 21st September we would arrive in Chile at 1:30 P.m. on the 21st September.
And that is where we currently reside, although finally having got a handle on what day it is and the time of day.

Stay tuned to the next exciting enstallment and take care all,
Bri and Linz

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