Blogs from Bay of Plenty, North Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 16

Tauranga for New Years Celebrations! So the hitching began looking to replicate the same success of previous efforts. Within minutes we’d been picked up by a nice guy on the way to pick his boss up from the airport. Great, airport in Tauranga would be just fine, that was until 10 minutes later when he pulled up at Rotorua airport and let us out. Grrr! We were grateful for the lift don’t get me wrong but now we were perched next to a fast flowing busy main road where the likelihood of anyone being able to see our sign as they passed, never mind have the time to pull over, was slim. However we gave it a go and as luck would have it a white Land Cruiser pulled up with our host driver for the ... read more

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year Hello! Hope you all had a great Christmas and kept warm! We certainly enjoyed ourselves in the sun! It was very different celebrating Christmas without any snow!! Christmas for us consisted of eating pancakes, bacon (kiwi style) eggs and fried shrimp in the morning- It was most delicious! In the afternoon, we basked in the sun with our hostel friends and chilled out. In the evening, our hostel had a potluck dinner which was very delicious and we brought surprise spread and it went over well. Although they didn't have seafood sauce we substituted it with salsa. Our hostel "mom" baked a traditional kiwi style dessert called pavlova roll with fresh fruit along with peanut clusters (we know them as "haystacks") . Later in the evening, we jammed with ... read more

How are you all? Well, I shall spend my first Christmas away from the UK and it feels a bit strange. As summer is kicking in here in New Zealand it seems odd that the sun goes down at 9pm at Christmas time - how can kids be in bed for Santa when it's still sunny? I will begin the travel part back in Sydney. Hmmm... My last entry slated Sydney but to some extent I think that coming from Manilla direct to there was perhaps too much of a contrast. Sure it has wonderful weather and the the landmarks we have come to recognise - the opera house and harbour bridge are worth a look, it just felt a bit like the UK, only with more convicts. In fairness I did quite like it ... read more

Advent, Advent ein Lichtlein brennt - der Countdown hat mal wieder begonnen. Linus Geburtstag, Nikolaus, Weihnachten und Silvester... eine einzige non-stop-party!... read more

Familiar faces, the smell of eggs and sun burn!!! Its funny we spent less time on the plane between Fiji and New Zealand than we did in the bus getting from Auckland airport to Tauranga. I mean we’d heard the roads weren’t great and their “motor ways” are well not even duel carriageways, but we didn’t really think we would be sitting down for so long. We had got on two buses, the first we were hurried onto at airport after asking the lady at the stop if she could just confirm something for us…”hey you two, British people, this bus is yours” even though the one we were due to get wasn’t for another hour, we’d just arrived early to ask and check. So we got on anyway and confused the driver with our reservation ... read more