THE REST OF NEW ZEALAND

Hey there, OK... so we admit it, we have been a wee bit lazy with the blog recently so we r going to do a quick update to catch yous up to where we are now, because were sooo far behind.

So after the amazing encounter with the dolphins we headed to Dunedin, which is Gaelic for New Edinburgh so it has a lot of Scottish heritage... but we thought we would give the only castle in new Zealand a miss n head straight to c the Albatross'... the Royal Albatross has the longest wingspan off all birds measuring up to 3.6m... that's long! there was 3 chicks, but unfortunately we could only view them from the observation room, but even from where we were they looked like massive fur balls, and at only a few months old they can be the size of a microwave...that's big!

after that it was down to the beach to see yellow eyed penguins,.. sounds exciting, i mean who ain't seen a penguin.... but it was sooo amazing seeing the in the wild and we had to hide it trenches so as not to disturb them. After them been out at sea catching fish all day they would then get washed up on to the beach n toddle there way through the sand past us and back to there "home" It was so cute.

Then it was the whales we were off to see next..
4o mins in a boat than a lot of waiting around till they could signal one then there it was... really it just looked like a log floating about but minute it went to dive back under and brought its tail up was just spectacular... and luckily we didn't get eaten:) (not to worry if we did though, because Ive seen Pinocchio loads of times:))

Up further to Christchurch we went to what they call an open zoo, exciting.... so we fed the giraffes, got a close encounter with the Rhinos, fed the farm animals then... it was into the cage we went... through the lion encounter whilst the keeper fed them. they were all over the cage, climbing up the side, on the roof. it was amazing.. and once again we didn't get eaten:)

Getting away from what felt like a wildlife safari we decided to do black water rafting, its sort of like white water rafting except ur in a dark cane with only a headlight and everyone is on separate floating rings.... and its not as rough!! It was fun, traveling through the caves looking at glow worms then jumping over 2 waterfalls... it was than followed with a hot shower and some soup, yum!

With 1 week left we travelled up to the north island and went to explore the northland.. it was a really beautiful area and we visited the point in where the pacific ocean merges with the Tasman sea.... although we expected it to look much better it was still pretty cool to see.

On our second last day it was pouring down and we were not going to bother going to see the Kuri Kuri Tree, which is 2000yrs old and called the "King of the Forest" because its that big..... but how glad were we that we changed our mind... this thing was HUGE, like so so so so massive u wouldn't actually believe.
Its 51m high and had a girth of 13m. Seeing this was definitely the highlight of new Zealand. Its so much bigger than it looks in the pictures(they r not up yet, but will b hopefully soon)

And now we are in Figi, we arrived last night so this is our 1st day in the sun, we r going to book an 11night/ 12day island hop which will take us to all the beautiful paradise islands and we will be doing activities.... when we r not we will probably be lying on a hammock, soaking up the sun and drinking cocktails.... not trying to make anyone jealous..honest.. but we have 3 whole wks of this:D xxxxxxxxxxxxxx