Woke up to the lovely smell of rotten eggs this morning and with the weather not looking too good we spent the day around the hostel and in the lounge

Still on a high from yesterday but with nothing much else to do in Taupo we set off north. About 5 minutes later on the road we passed 'Shaun the Prawn' farming park, where we soon learnt that we could fish for our own prawns! So we hired a rod and bought some bait and settled ourselves on a bench beside one of the pools - home to 25,000 prawns, surely we'd catch something! 30 minutes later we had! A nice large prawn, but we with not really knowing how to tak...

Just another nice and relaxing morning today... well... apart from us jumping 15000ft out of a plane! There is apparently no better place in the world to throw yourself out of an aircraft than over the stunning Lake Taupo and it's surrounding volcanoes. We did just ring up for a brief chat with the skydiving company, but for some unknown reason we had managed to book ourselves on to the next jump! Uh-oh... When getting to the base pumped up with excitment and n...

With the weather not looking too good again and with the only thing of interest being the 19km Tongariro Crossing hike which was closed, we set off to Lake Taupo. The rain stopped us doing much round the town itself but we did get to go and wath the idiots jumping 50 metres over a river on an elastic chord. We weren't that brave (or stupid) so we just viewed from the platform. Hopefully the weather will clear up tomorrow!

A sleepless night thanks to the storm outside, we actually thought the van was going to topple over in the wind ! The first thing we did was find out about the weather for the next few days - oh dear! Rain, winds and storms for pretty much all of the North Island for the next 5 days! So we found a nice campsite with a cosey tv lounge and spent the day watching the box, where we learned that some walkers had gone missing in the storms not too far from us, several ...