I had to get up at 6.30 this morning to get picked up for the Hobbiton tour I had booked onto, which was a bit difficult after the partying from the days before. I was thinking why on earth did I decide to go given I've only watched 45 minutes of Lord of the Rings, but I'm glad I went, although it was quite expensive- tickets for a tour are $75 but I had to pay $110 to go from Rotorua, which seemed a bit steep for an hour on a coach with lots of other people. App...

We caught the bus to ragamuffin at around 4 and we met up with some of the boys who were also staying at the Base hostel car park. Damian Marley was amazing, and I was happy he played Love and Unity. Afterwards, I got some more festivals and jerk chicken (with no gravy as it was very spicy yesterday) and some Indians had a stall outside their house selling some really nice chickpea flour eggy bread (or something like that) and Thibault, one of the guys we met up ...

After sleeping in today, so that we were well rested for Raggamuffin festival, we went to collect my laptop from Mike. Thankfully all he needed to do was tighten the hard drive in place so he didn't charge me for it, and was extremely willing to help out- he offered to give it back to me when he had finished for the day yesterday and when he was out the back having a beer, and he was having his lunch when we did get there, but he didn't mind coming out to meet me...

The car park we were in last night turned out to be the wrong companies car park so we arrived just as the bus came to pick us up (it was only a bit up the road from where we were before but we maybe didn't leave ourselves long enough to eat breakfast and get our stuff together- I forgot to bring all important water so had to buy the bus drivers water off him for $3). He took us to the other side of the walk, and it started off a bit chilly as we were up so high ...

We allowed ourselves a lie-in until 8.30, and then filled up the car with petrol and our assortment of plastic bottles with cold water from Burger King and drove to Taupo. Once at the I-site, I was asking where various things were and when it came to asking where the thermal pools were, embarrassed the lady by asking where the "spermal, no... spermal, no..." was. Alice had realised she needed some shoes to walk the 20 km hike of the Tongariro crossing in, so we q...