Today was our last tour, and it was fantastic. We arrived to greet Andy at Hinterland Tours in his new 19 seater Mercedes tour van. For the six of us, it worked great. We started with a brief of Tauranga (pronounced Toeranga) city and then proceeded to a tour of a Honey farm (Convita) that sold a variety of honey based products including the Manuka tree bloom where the the bees produce only 1/2 teaspoon of honey total in their lifetime. The Queen bee was marked with a blue dot so that she could be seen quite easily.

From there we went to a working Kiwi fruit farm and got a lesson on this product which is grown quite heavily in this area. On the way we went to lunch on the banks of Lake Rotorua, a nice cafe where a Hamburger and Grilled Cheese with Chippies went for $50.00NZ. The "tomato sauce" was extra an extra $1.00NZ. Ultimately because of the price I put these two highly priced modules in my pocket, only to find that they exploded in my pocket at the Thermal pools.

Then we headed for Okere Falls where they actually do some high-water rafting on the river too !
After lunch we headed to the colourful steaming lakes and thermal pools unique to Whakarewarwa (in the Maori language WH is prounced Fu) so the thermals are actually pronounced Fukarewewara).

This is our last port-of-call before Auckland, so we're basically done until we check into the house. At least we'll have some hi-speed Wi-Fi I hope. Deborah was feeling remarkably better today, so she could get out and on the last tour of the trip. All the rest of our exploration will be in a Hi-Ace Van that we've rented while in NZ.