Day 7: 7/1/13
This morning the Maori guys had breakfast ready for us. I had cereal. There was French toast aswell. We spent a whole taking group photos aswell before getting back on the bus and heading to Rotorua.
Some people were going rafting but some of us wanted to see some of the geothermal activity and stuff so we were told to get out and go to a park in Rotorua. There was a park where there were pools of mud with steam and stuf so we saw that. Then we had two hours with nothing to do so we just wandered around a bit, mostly just chatted and didn't see much as we didn't know what to look for! The guide had said something yesterday about goin to villages with geothermal activity and Maori shows but it turns out you have to stay overnight to have enough time to do that. We felt like we didn't see anything really so I will have to come back to see more Moari stuff!
Then we went back to the bus and headed to Taupo. We stopped at a mud pool first. That was a big version of what we saw in the park. It was cool though, much more bubbling. Then we stopped at a pool part of a river where the cold water meets the hot water from the springs. I didn't have my swim suit on so I didn't go swimming, but I walked around in it. Afterwards we saw a sign saying not to put your head in the water as you could get amaeobic meningitis. Lots of the swimmers were bothered as they had their head in! Further on in the journey there were lots of pine trees which are native to California but in California it takes 80 years for them to grow and in New Zealand they can grow in 50 years. Then we went into Huka waterfall. It was very pretty but only a dot compared to the Iguassu falls!
We got to Taupo then and took ages to check in. It's a pain when there's 44 people to do one by one! People went off to do skydiving but it was cancelled because it was windy. There was wifi here $4 for 24 hours which is a lot better than 1hr so most people got it!! Everyone did their own thing for a while. I went down the road to Lake Taupo to have a look. It was a really nice lake with a volcano in the background so, of course got some photos! I went to the supermarket then as we have to stock up for the next few days- were going to be out of civilisation again!
Later, most people got a dinner in the hostel for $5 and we spent a while adding each other on Facebook. Then we got showered and dressed and went out!
It was good craic. We had a drink in the hostel and then went down to a pub. There were other tour buses there too. It was good craic. All our bus was just dancing together most of the time. All good fun. We weren't back until after three though which is not going to help tomorrow!