Day 129-131

We had a monsterous trip from Nelson to Waitomo that in total took 28 hours. We left Nelson for Picton at 0830 and had a couple of hours in Picton where we had lunch in a nice cafe/bar for our Anniversary. We then had our ferry to Wellington and once in Wellington we had to kill a couple of hours, so we sat in a hostel restaurant. At the train station they were filming and had a flock of sheep in a pen.

From Wellington we boarded the night bus to Rotorua. We arrived at 0330 and our next coach was not until 0830, so we had 5 hours in the rain with nowhere to stay. We decided to have a look to see if there were any hostels open to get some shelter, luckily we found Cactus Jacks front door open so we snuck in and had a couple of hours sleep on the sofa with the fire on. We woke up at 0600 to make certain that no-one saw us and headed to Ronnie's Cafe for coffee and breakfast.

We arrived in Waitomo at 1130, had lunch and went to bed exhausted. We got back up for dinner and then went back to bed.

The following day we went caving in Te Anoroa Caves, where we had a rubber ring and went through the cave, down waterfall slides and jumping backwards of a waterfall into the river. We wanted to go to Waitomo Caves although due to flooding in the area the caves were closed.

After the caving we decided on a walk which was recommended to us. It was one of the top ten short walks in NZ.

We then chilled out in the common room. Where we met a couple from New York who were kind enough to give us a lift to Mel and Neil's, which we were grateful for.