Rotorua is officially the smelliest place we have ever been, it is apparently something to do with sulphur but we werent convinced!!! It is this sulphur that makes all the thermal parks and spa's around the area, the sights are fantastic....it just a shame about the smell! So after a day of walking around with our hands on our noses we started tO get used to it and had a lovely night camping by the 'blue lake'. It was a gorgeous small lake where we swam and had a picnic before spending the night there. The next day we had arranged to white water raft down the largest commercially rafted falls in the world! 7 METERS HIGH!!! We checked in and got kitted up with life jackets and helmets before headed to the river. After a Mauori prayer to ask to keep us all safe we climbed on board and began practising our paddling! We hit the first falls of only 3 metres and we began only too aware how big 7 meters was going to be.....as we lined up for the big one we began to paddle really hard.....'Get down, Get down, Get down'!!! A huge gush of water went right over us and all 6 of us including the raft were under the water! Within few seconds we had popped back up to the surface and were high fiving our triumph! While we had all managed to stay inside the raft down the falls, Shelly was still celebrating as we hit the next rapids and she was soon floating down the rapid 'raftless!' After a run in with a rock (the rock won) she made it to the other end of the rapids with a nice souvenir of the day....a big cut on her shin! Sooooo worth the cut though as the rapids were amazing and we all made it down to the other end in one piece, we even took one little falls without the raft!

Once we were dry and patched up we headed to 'Hells Gate' thermal reserve, this was a bit like craters of the moon except there was actually mud and water being squirted out of the ground and huge lakes of mud over 100 degrees in temperature! We also got to try our hand at wood carving...Rich made a wobbly Kiwi and Shelly and wrinkled fern....there keepers!

Our final activity in Rotorua was to head up the cable car and take a trip (or four) on the luge! The luge was even better than the one in Queens town, we managed to sneak and extra free go so by the fourth trip we were taking the corners on two wheels and Rich had managed to cut up every parent and child in his way!