Once I had suitably come down from my skydive I headed North to Rotorua. Just on the outskirts of Taupo I picked up a young Maori named Jason hoping from some conversation on the jouney up through the thermal area. This didn't quite worked out as I had hoped as after saying thanks for the ride and telling me his name and giving one word answers to every other conversation starter he said nothing for about 20 minutes and then proceeded to fall asleep! About an hour later when we arrived in Rotorua I had to wake him up to find out where he wanted dropped off!!

I then proceeded to Ra and Kath's (Sister Sophie's husband Jeff's Aunt an Uncle - there will be a test later!). I was really looking forward to experiencing the Maori culture from a non tourist perspective. Over dinner (after the food was blessed) Ra explained some of the history of the interaction between the Europeans and the Maoris - good to hear from a Maori perspective. We continued the discussion over beer which was really informative (the converstaion rather than the beer although in much the same way as XXXX Gold in Australia there is a trivia question in the bottletop of Tui - only the Southern Hemisphere would invent educational beer!)

The following day I did a tour round Rotorua and got my adrenaline fix from a Zorb and Freefall Xtreme. The Freefall Xtreme was a very powerful fan blowing upwards that you jump on and hover in midair! Well that's the plan anyway! In was much harder work than it looks but was good fun and I kind of had it in the end. You have control over moving forward s and backwards by moving your arms but is pretty sensitive and if you get it wrong you fall off the air and land on the padded sides! The Zorb is a giant inflatable ball that you climb inside along with some luke warm (why do I always spell warm with an l instead of an r?!) water and then get pushed off the top of a hill! In my case down a zig-zag track making the ride a combination of a roller coaster and water slide - very smile inducing! I then returned to Ra and Kath's (remembered the relation?!) for another good feed in return for getting their iMac up to date! I also set up Ra on Skype which allowed us all to talk to Sophie, Jeff, Samuel and Haidee which was great. To allow me to experience the Maori commuinity we decided I needed to be there at a weekend so i decided to head to the Coromandle in the morning and return at the weekend with the added possiblity of some boar hunting - should be good!