Lobby call, 06:00, roughly 100 of us congregate outside the hotel while we load the busses with luggage and greet each other in the normal fashion for 6 in the morning after a long hard week at work. Today we travel to New Zealand. As much as I love Australia, the people the sights, the culture, there is something about New Zealand that makes me feel at home and makes me want to keep going back. Despite our early departure from Sydney this morning, with the time change we will not be arriving in until it is too late to continue on to Christchurch. This means we will pick up our camper van tomorrow after a short early morning flight. A nice easy flight over the Tasman Sea and we have landed at Wellington Airport, The Middle Of Middle Earth. Nearly everything in New Zealand has some sort of reference back to Lord Of The Rings, even the airports. As we deplane, we walk underneath 2 giant eagles, one of which is carrying Gandalf, and off in the distance there is a souvenir shop with 2 big trolls along the back wall. There is a rush to the Vodafone booth to get a local sim card for the upcoming 5 weeks we will be spending here. We all acquire our sim cards and go and load the bus to our downtown hotel, which the majority of us will only be spending one night in before heading off on adventures all over the country. With dinner now done, Taylor and I get to packing up our bags, we are going to make do with minimal items to keep the travelling light and easy. I have my camera bag on my back, which i always carry with me, and contains very little other than camera gear, and an old backpacking bag that doubles as a duffle bag for me to check on our flight. This bag will contain both of our tripods, and a few extra shirts, underwear, socks, hiking shoes, toiletries and rain and cold weather gear for the two of us. Taylor is carrying a medium sized backpacking bag, containing her camera equipment and a change of cloths for herself. Now that we are all packed, we are faced with the task of finding a place to store our regular suitcases full of all of our personal belongings for the next week while we are away. The hotel front desk has no space, so that is not an option, we will need to find a friend in the cast who has decided to stick around Wellington for the week who is willing to let us leave our suitcases in their already small room. We managed to find a friend who was willing and we hid the bags away as much as possible as to not get in their way while we are gone. Now back to our room for some shut eye before the 05:00 alarm!