The ferry took around 3 and a half hours and is a very scenic crossing. We stayed the night in Wellington and visited the botanic gardens the next day before making our way up to Lake Taupo.
We spent 3 nights here and visited Rotorua which is one big geo thermal valley. We visited one of the largest Geysers to watch it erupt, what they didn't mention when we paid to go in is that they throw a bag of soap inside the Geyser to induce it, haha, not very natural but it was quite spectacular.
We then ventured to Hells Gate to have a mud bath and soak in a sulphur pool, this smelt really nice, not!! Pete threw himself into it, literally - see the pics for a good laugh.
The next day we went black water rafting at Waitoma caves to see the glow worms. We got into our soggy wetsuits, grabbed our rubber rings and and went down to the river to have a practice jump, backwards into the water - absolutely freezing. We the ventured into the cave and throughout the journey we did a mixture of walking, jumping off waterfalls backwards and floating down the river on our rings. The glow worms looked brilliant however they are not actually worms, just maggots with poo that glows! We were then told to make our way out of the cave by ourselves without any lights, I got a bit freaked out when I couldn't see and wasn't going anywhere but we eventually came out into the forest. Such a good tour albeit a tad cold.
We spent the final few days of our trip in the Bay of Islands which was very pretty and scenic before heading back down to Auckland for our flight to Brisbane on 10th October.