8th Feb - we left Rotorua at around 11am and headed to towards Tongariro National Park and Taupo - the adventure capital of the North.
We stopped on the way to check out Huka falls. The falls are 11m high and was actually formed by an earthquake.
We hopped back on the bus and continued to Taupo. When we arrived in Taupo me, Hannah and a girl called Kylie shared a 3 bed room. It was so nice having our own room as we had been sharing 8-26 bed dorms the last 2 weeks.
We went to the hot water pools in the evening, which was in a river. It was boiling but not particularly deep but still really cool. When we left the pools to catch a taxi back to the hostel, we got lost! Shock. But it wasn't just us this time, there was 16 of us all lost in the dark! I had my broken flip flops on too, so Stuart gave me a piggyback some of the way! We finally managed to find a pub after walking for about 40 minutes and called for a taxi to pick us up!
When we got back, everyone went out to the hostel nightclub. I felt quite ill for some reason so unfortunately I stayed in. I was gutted! But there was no way I could go out and we were hiking the Tongariro crossing at 5am the next morning. It's rated as one of the world's top 10 one day walks.
9th Feb - I got woken up by Hannah at 5am telling me to get up for our hike. I asked her when did she go to bed and she said she hadn't been to sleep yet. I soon realised she was still drunk!! So I told her there was no way she could do a 7 hour hike, and I still felt pretty ill so I wasn't feeling up to it. So we decided to go tubing down the river with some of our group instead.
We went to a shop to buy inflatable rubber rings, rubber ducks, beers, cider and ice. We walked to the river and blew up our rings and put our booze and ice in a blow up fish. We had a floating bar! Yeaaaah! Brilliant Tekkers.
We hopped into our rings and floated effortlessly down the river, beer in hand. I thought to myself.. What a way to spend a Saturday? The water was unbelievably clear. We threw our rubber ducks in the water for a race, but we soon lost them!
As we floated down the river, we bumped into other people from our bus and I formed a cluster with them having the comfiest spot ever with my head back and feet up on tubes. Boom. A floating sunbed. Brilliant.
We ended up floating down to the hot water spring we were at the night before, which was so lush as it warmed us up. We left with everyone to head back to the hostel, but we ended up getting a taxi back the rest of the way.
When we got back, we got ready and went out to the bar. The night finished with a maccy d's. The end.