This morning we got up early, dismantled our tent and caught the bus back down to Auckland and then onto Rotorua, nearer the centre of the North Island. It was quite a long journey, about 8 hours, with a crazy bus driver on the second coach who seemed to find it near impossible to drive in a straight line even on the motorway!We were quite glad when we reach Rotorua, but then had a pretty long walk out to our campsite…well, it felt a long way with our rucksacks. That's a definite disadvantage of camping, as most of the campsites are further out of town whereas the backpackers are more central. It will be much easier with our hire car to camp.Despite being a bit of a walk out of town, our campsite at the moment is the best so far…it has 3 thermal spring pools (which luckily don't smell of eggs) which we are free to use whenever we like, a swimming pool, a steam hangi cooker and also a hot water beach. The ground is also really warm as its so near thermal sites, which keeps us a bit warmer at night! It's been colder than we expected at nights so far, and we only have sleeping bag liners with us. I'm glad I brought some leggings (now my thermals!) and extra jumpers with me! We had a look through some brochures of stuff we might like to do here, but its all very tourist driven and the prices reflect that so we might have to prioritise!

-S