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After a one night stay in Auckland with Jude & Glynn – always a pleasure, never a chore – we headed up to the Bay of Islands for a mini-cruise on The Rock. The night before the cruise we found a campsite that overlooked a waterfall, Haruru Falls, and picked a prime spot on the waterfront. We sat outside the van and made a delicious stir fry for dinner; we thought we were in heaven. Around 9pm I went back inside the van to get things ready for the night and I noticed one or two mosquitoes. I told Isaac to shut the van door, and it was only once he’d done so that I realised that the problem was far worse than I thought. I shone the torch around and discovered to my horror that the van was filled with mosquitoes. Hundreds of them. I called Isaac in panic and asked him what he thought we should do. “Well, our first option would be to light a mosquito coil” he said. “Which we don’t have” I pointed out. “So” continued Isaac, “our only other option is to kill them all.” We looked at each other for a moment while we contemplated the task ahead of us.

The carnage which ensued is not suitable for those a delicate constitution, but suffice to say roughly one hour later, we had managed to squash, mangle and flatten almost all of the little buggers. The van was littered with corpses and when we went to bed we counted 55 dead mozzies just in the one panel above our heads.

The following day at 5pm we waited on the jetty in Paihia to be collected by Climax, the tender to The Rock. There were around 35 other people waiting and I looked around to see who might be potential friends. Over the next 22 hours we met a few people we didn’t particularly click with, like a couple of English nurses – Charlie (male) & Charlie (female) – who were disappointingly dull, and a few people with whom we became firm friends: a Scottish couple called Toni & Kenny who were on their honeymoon and were hilarious, an English girl called Jo who was travelling by herself and one of the crew, Chris. We had a shooting competition (which Kenny won) off the back of the boat, aiming at a floating duck which bobbed about as we motored along to our destination, got our rods out and fished (but no one caught anything but a few small bait fish), ate a feast of lamb, sausage, steak & salad, went night kayaking after dark with Chris, looked up at the infinite stars and watched as our paddles made the incredible phosphorescence (glowing algae) in the water twinkle before diving in to the water and swimming around in it too, stayed up late around the fire chewing the fat with Alice (an 18yr old English girl over here travelling by herself), Chris & Jose, another crew member who was from Chile. Eventually it was time to go to bed and I was very proud to be the last one on the whole boat to make it to my (top bunk) bed. Next day we had breakfast and went to Motorua island to hike, snorkel, kayak & sunbathe before eventually heading back to the mainland. All in all it was an amazing trip and we had a ball.

We had two more stops on the way back down to Auckland to spend Christmas with Jude & Glynn. First of these was Whananaki, a proper one-horse town. When we arrived at the campsite, we asked the owner where she recommended we go for lunch – she looked at us blankly and said “Well the shop is right next door…” turns out ‘the shop’ was the town, being a grocers, takeaway food, post office and petrol station rolled into one. We had a (slightly rubbish) lunch and went to see the only attraction in the area, the Southern Hemisphere’s longest footbridge. It was very long and lead absolutely nowhere.

Next we went to Waipu Cove, where the weather took a turn for the worse and we drove to the famous Waipu Caves. The Rough Guide said ‘wear old clothes and good footwear, take a couple of good torches each and explore’. We arrived in the pouring rain so we sat and waited for a bit until it slowed, during which time we fell asleep. Waking up after an hour or so we found several other cars had arrived. Everyone else seemed to be kitting up big time - backpacks, rain jackets and hiking shoes - and we felt horribly unprepared in our normal clothes. Then we read on in the Rough Guide: ‘The cave…is impenetrable after heavy rain’ and decided to give it a miss. Still, nice place for a nap we decided, and there’s even a loo for when you wake up bursting for a wee.

On our way back to Auckland for Christmas, we went past Sheep World - we liked the logo so much we decided to stop. It was brilliant, we got to feed lambs, watch sheep dog trials, have a go at sheep shearing, feed eels (nope, no idea what that has to do with sheep) and ended up staying there for hours.