Day 24- Fri 1st Feb

We woke up late today, think we all needed a good sleep. We are sharing a four bed dorm but the other girl left quite early in the morning so we had the room to ourselves. It's pretty basic, no windows and the toilets/showers are down the hall. Headed for the Sky Tower after lunch, it's the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere apparently, it was right next to our hostel which was handy. Had a look around but didn't go to the top as it was really expensive. We watched a few people bungee jump off the top…crazy people! We spent the rest of the day just walking around and window shopping. Had a free BBQ at the hostel and spent the evening on the internet writing blogs and emails. Its good to have high speedaccess!

Day 25- Sat 2nd Feb

Had an awful night's sleep, people were skate boarding down the corridors at like 2am…whatever next! So we were pretty tired for the start of our tour with Contiki. Had to meet the bus at a hotel down the road, had to heave our backpacks down the equivalent of New Zealand's Oxford Street…not fun. Signed in for the tour and boarded the coach. Seemed like there were a lot of Australians and girls on our tour. Our tour guide is called Nathan, he's a kiwi and seems really enthusiastic, too much at times! He says 'guys' and 'sweet as' way too much. We were on the coach for 2 hours before we got to our first stop of Waitomo which was a small town with the population of 50. Here there were the famous glow worm caves but none of us really fancied doing any trips so we had a nap! We are staying at the Kiwipacker hotel which is really nice compared to the hostels we have stayed in, its luxury to get your own towels!

In the evening we had a free dinner of pizza and then headed to the local bar for a few drinks. All the aussie's seemed to stick together and the girls were getting really drunk. Us English girls were keeping our dignity and playing it cool and had an early night ready for tomorrow.

Day 26- Sun 3rd Feb

Today we had an early start, had a really good breakfast at the hotel then headed for Rotorua. On the way we stopped at the Agrodome for a very random farm show…there are no words to describe how random it was, let's just say I haven't learnt so much about sheep ever and there were even dogs sitting on sheep.

We had to watch those who were doing zorbing before we went to the Skyline and Luge. This was a cable car that took you up to a really high point on one of the hills around Rotorua. There some really great views of the lakes up there. We had 2 rides on the luges which were like bob sleigh things, they were hard to get the hang of at first and were pretty nippy. Lisa of course was speeding ahead whilst me and Vicky were trying not to kill ourselves!

Jumped back on the coach for a quick tour of the local area, and by quick I mean 5 minutes and it was on the way to our hotel anyway! The local area stinks of rotten eggs because of the hot springs so it takes a while to get used to. We are staying at the Sudima Hotel which again is very nice, we were very excited about having a kettle in our room. We chilled out in our plush room before heading downstairs for dinner, it was a huge buffet and had the best desserts. We were thinking we needed to stock up on food before the rest of our trip as we are rarely going to eat this good again!

After dinner they put on a show for us which was about the Maori. They performed some really good dances and songs, the men did the hakka which was scary. After the show we went to the hotsprings which were next door to the hotel, had a paddle and tried to sit in the pools without burning, some were 42'c!