Arriving in Rotorua the first thing Lisa did was blame Ben for making the campervan stink!! But then we reailsed the smell was actually sulphur from the Volcanic activity we were surrounded by, Lisa had to apologise (normally the smell is Ben though!).

We had a choice of traditional Maori villages we could visit and we opted for the cheaper version which turned out to be the better option as we were visiting a Maori village which was still lived in and therefore more interesting. We had a tour around the village where we got to see the traditional houses and learnt about the history of the Maori people. The Maori people live on Volcanic land therefore it stinks and they have lots of Volcanic activity around them such as boiling mud pools, boiling hot springs and geysers. We also saw how the Maori took advantage of living around the Volcanic activity such as using the steam to cook their food, using the boiling springs to cook food, using the mud to sell for face masks and using the springs to bathe in! We also some of the giant geysers shooting out of the ground they sometimes go up to 30 metres!

We watched a traditional Maori show where we were bothed dragged on to the stage to participate, we both had to do the traditional Maori dance sadly there isnt a picture of Ben on the blog but we have a brilliant video which we can show you when we get home. After the Maori village we had a BBQ and had a dip in the hot springs on our campsite nice and relaxing hopefully we will start to look younger soon!

The next day we wanted to climb rainbow mountain but were scared off by some randoms hanging aorund the carpark and didnt want to leave the campervan there, Ben was a little disappointed Lisa a little happy. Instead of climbing rainbow mountain we decided to go to a natural hot spring we had heard about, it was a lovely river running through a forest and all the water was VERY hot actually it was boiling! The water came from the volcanic water further upstream and had cooled a little but was still boiling, we spent the afternoon here and it was nice and relaxing! The next day we set off towards Lake Taupo!