A Whole New Zealand World - plus multiple cuppas!!

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Hello everyone! We have been very naughty and rejected our blog duties for quite some time now! We have been up to loads, hence the lack of entries - also the internet is much more expensive in Australasia than it is in South America and we were living in a people carrier, so blogging took quite a bit of forward planning!



So - we arrived in New Zealand at 4am on 10th March after a long 13 hour flight from Santiago, crossing the date line which means that for us, 9th March 2011 never happened - hope we didn’t miss much! As we still had a few days before we were due to pick up our Spaceship campervan, James' cousin Megan had kindly agreed to put us up in her house in Auckland, despite our early arrival and the fact that it was on her 25th birthday!



After being in South America for over three months, living out of a backpack and sleeping in hostels (some of which were less than desirable), it was so nice to finally be back in a house again and do all the things that you usually take for granted - like having a proper cup of tea and watching the telly! We headed out to find the supermarket, it still felt bizarre to see signs in English and be able to have conversations that were not in broken spanglish!! We managed to find Heinz beans 'English Recipe' which was amazing and we were both quite excited about seeing all the normal looking food!! The next two days was filled with food we had spent 3 months talking about with fellow travellers - good fish & chips, beans on toast, proper PG tips - you get the drift! We also had a great time exploring Auckland and going to the races for the day for Megan's birthday.



After 5 days it was time to pick up our Spaceship (Toyota previa) which would be our home for the next 5 and a half weeks! We kind of cheated and decided to hire a SatNav with it, as it was 50 quid for the 38 days - this was probably the best decision we made as it was worth it's weight in gold! Definitely helped us out in regards to where we could get petrol from in the middle of nowhere! From Auckland we headed North to visit Megan's parents on their farm where we stayed for the night, then on to the Bay of Islands where we were to meet Ellie and Iain, my friends from Leicester uni who were going to travel with us for 2 weeks before settling in Auckland themselves to work for a year.

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