Well we made it! It was one long journey getting here, about 30hr of travelling I think, but our feet are finally on NZ soil...and it feels good. Although Em feels like the ground is still moving.The flight wasn’t too bad, there was loads of movies, music and documentaries to keep us entertained and excellent food which even filled me up! Our first meal was prawn cocktail followed by a gorgeous Lamb curry, top off with chocolate cake and cheese and biscuits...oh and don't forget the free booze. We also passed time by playing games against each other, I even got my name at the top of the leader board on one game against the rest of the plane hence I found it quite hard to sleep. Emma on the other hand slept far too easy, mind you she was sprawled out over me and her chair, giving her self that little extra leg room and more ‘horizontalness’!We landed in Auckland midday, but even with our free pair of socks and toothbrush we still had quite a decent aroma to us. It was fairly simple getting through customs...we had our boots and tent checked in BIO-SECURITY, but everything was ok. We got a bus into the centre of Auckland and headed to our apartment, but we didn’t anticipate that Auckland has some quite hilly roads and the 5mins walk took that little bit longer with 30kg on our backs! It was well worth it though as the apartment is really nice, we’re so glad we didn’t have to spend the night in a noisy hostel or at a random persons house, if we had gone with the HelpX option. The apartment has everything we need here...even a washing machine and free powder! We had an early night last night, only popped out to the supermarket to grab some food for tea, and then zap we were gone.We awoke today to find that there had been an earth quake in Christchurch, we’ve seen abit of the local news, it seems pretty bad but people seem ok, we hope our friends down there are ok too. The first thing to sort today was our banking, everything went smoothly, got our EFTPOS cards, one each for our joint account. Banks here are amazing, they have free internet and unlike the UK they don’t have a massive wall of glass between the banker and customers, its all open and its wasn’t busy. Amazing.I got a ton of leaflets from the iSite (visitor centre) and we had a walk around the docks which are really nice, the sea is beautiful, its got that really nice light blue colour to it! We also bobbed over to the Sky Tower and saw someone do the Sky Jump, think we will go up before the weeks done and check out the view.We just had a potter about today really to get a taste of city life in New Zealand, whilst we get over jet lag. We can’t believe how nice the people are here, people in the shops ask how you are and have a nice day etc people in the streets are the same, even the wildlife are friendly we had these little birds eat from our hands as we had lunch.Anyway, we’re going make some tea and head out later I think to see whats going down in the city of sails. Hopefully heading to a car auction tomorrow. Will post back soonLee & Em xxxP.S. Thanks for the messages on the Guestbook, we really love reading them