After a night full of war alarm sirens, turly horrific. We headed to Rotorua in search of thermal wonders, geysers and natural hot pools. After a moderately long drive by Josh (i still hadn't had the confidence to get behind the wheel of our space shuttle), we arrive in a small city, practically clear sky, warm and sunny! :) However this nice partially industrial town was overrun by the smell of sulphur, basically rotten egg odours spewing out of steam grates! t...

It had rained most of the night and into the morning so we had to decide what to do based upon the bad weather conditions. We decided to go for the cheap basically free option and found this place called Weta Cave. After my disappointment of not being able to visit Hobbiton, aka 'Bag End' in LOTR, due to filming, Weta Cave was the best option as it was free and had lots of exciting stuff about films and props etc. Weta is a company that do animation, costumes, p...

We awoke to horrendously noisy pouring rain, after a night of more war sirens! The rain unfortunately ruining our plans for the day to go and see the 'Lady Knox' Geyser (20metres natural jet of hot water) at Wai-O-Tapu. However the rain did not want this to happen So we decided to head towards Taupo and see what was there, on our way we found the Huka Falls, a river of white water rapids with a waterfall where 200, 000 litres of water pours over every second! V...

We woke up early to a bright clear day, pigeons sitting on the telephone line and a dog having a face off with a cat. Sadly the cat outwitted the dog at every move much to my disappointment. We had decided to wake up early and make the long drive down to the Waitomo caves, which included a cave full of glow worms. As we arrived in the car park hunger struck so for the first time we had decided to take out our own mini kitchen and cook noodles alongside the van, ...

Discovered that earplugs and eyemask's are essential in the van as lots of light gets in because one of the side doors and the backdoor are both missing curtains! So we use makeshift curtains of towels and blankets (stolen off the plane from fiji), sounds also become very aparrent, especially if its windy, which it really is in new zealand. We couldn't decide what to do for the day so we decided to go to the zoo, definetly one of my favourite things to see i...