Winding up

As with every mission into the unknown I cannot sleep, at all. My head occasionally spins with the things we haven't done yet. We have just enough time, 48 more hours in the city to finish preparing our kit, but it's still a lot of work getting it all pinned down. We know that anything weak will just manifest itself as dead weight, and both our packs are heavy-weight already.

Dossing around at the backpackers probably doesn't help but it's too much fun here. Everyone's totally friendly, and the national dish is pie.

Ozzie's found a hostel 100km out of Auckland which will move to as a staging post for upcoming birthdays and the start of whatever. And we've managed to book ourselves onto a government-run bushcraft course for a measly 80 bucks! That's about 5 times cheaper than anything in the UK, so we are, at last, quids in. And it means we've finally found the people who can put us onto that learning curve...