Yesterday I took a bus to Rotorua. I first very seriously repacked and threw about 2 thirds of my stuff into a big bag and left it in storage at the YHA. My lighter backpack I dragged the 30 minute walk to the busstop which, even being lighter than usual, proved pretty tiring. I picked up a Dunkin Donut on the way for breakfast and in honour of Kirsten de Haas with who introduced me to the nicest donuts in the world in New York, exactly a year previously. I had a strawberry one with sprinkles, Kirsten and my favourite, haha. A funny thing was that I not only had my backpack on my back and my hand luggage backpack on my front, I was also carrying a plastic bag with some food, including a box of 8 eggs. I had wanted eggs to cook with the night before but had only been able to buy 12 eggs. Now how does a solo-traveller like me finish 12 eggs? Not. So I decided to take them with me to Rotorua. As if backpacking isn't hard enough, I was now doing it with eggs. Great. Anyway. I got on the bus (very cheap bus called the Nakedbus. "Stripping travel of its costs!") and to my amusement, the bus started to complain after about half an hour and had to pull over at the side of the motorway. The driver tried to fix the suspension but after trying to pull away causing an almighty grinding/creaking sound, he gave up and had to call another bus to come get us. We all had to get off the bus into the berm of the motorway, drag our luggage from under the bus, put it into the new bus that arrived half an hour later, and the journey continued from there. It was kind of funny though, standing at the side of a motorway by a broken down bus xD Anyway, in Rotorua I had to walk another half an hour to my hostel which was hellish as breathing was unpleasant due to a rotten egg smell that is characteristic of the Rotorua area. The area is actively volcanic and there is lots of sulphur in the ground that causes a horrible eggy smell. Ugh. Anyway, the hostel was LOVELY. Really nice. The guy who showed me around was cool and there were some nice people in my room too. I had dinner with a Swiss guy from my dorm and then played Uno with him, 3 Germans and a Czech. Then the Swiss guy took out a game called Hands Up where you have to make the sign seen on a card as quickly as possible when it is turned over and it was hilarious. More people kept joining and in the end we were a solid group of about 9. It was cool. The Swiss guy, Marco, an Israeli guy called Pavel, a German woman called Raskit and I decided to go to a geothermal park today. Marco had a car so we all piled in this morning and drove to Wai-o-tapu, the most renowned geothermal area of Rotorua. There we watched a dude throw soap in the Lady Knox Geyser, making it explode which was, well, like a geyser. Yay. Then we wandered into the geothermal park and that was awesome. We decided to do the walk(there's a 70 minute round walk) in the opposite direction to the indicated route so as to avoid most of the tourists and this went well until we hit them somewhere near the middle but ah well. The pools we walked past were incredible, there was a bright, almost fluorescent greeny yellow pool ironically called The Devil's Bath which looked so unnatural I stood gaping at it for a few minutes, spluttering that there was no way that that could ever be natural even though the booklet explained how the colour came to be. Then we walked past more yellowy pools and grey ones and bubbling ones and steaming ones and a big greeny steaming one with a bright orange reef like rim round the edge that was filled with tiny bubbles, giving it the name Champagne Pool (although it didn't smell much like champagne unfortunately). We saw brown and blue and green flats and some lovely birds in this almost unnatural environment. I cannot imagine that it is a healthy place to live but there were birds around so the stench and acid gases didn't seem to hold back wildlife. We came to a part called the Artist's Palette and had a view over the Champagne Pool and another pool and the colours were amazing, light green, dark green, blue green, yellow, light blue, navy blue, orange, brown, grey, pink, red, white steam, it was incredible. We passed bubbling black pools with oil on top of them and more rock stained with yellow sulphur. It was a creepy landscape, I thought. I wasn't sure I liked it much, however beautiful and fascinating the colours were. On the way out we passed some bubbling mudpools where mud exploded up from the surface of the pools quite randomly making an amusing plopping sound. It was quite amusing watching dollops of mud fly randomly around the pool, especially when a dollop was slung towards a group of tourists who jumped back protectively brandishing their cameras above their heads. When we got back to the hostel, Raskit, Pavel and I bought Marco a ticket to a Polynesian Spa for that evening, as thanks for driving us and we all bought ourselves a ticket too. We then went to a 3D-maze for the fun of it. Marco and I teamed up against Pavel and Raskit to see who could get to all four coloured corners of the maze and back out again and for an hour Marco and I had great fun running around trying furiously to find our way to all the corners. It was surprisingly hard and we had a real laugh avoiding the other two and trying not to go round in circles. Marco and I were both quite into the race and won easily, and we happily watched Raskit and Pavel come grumpily stumbling out of the maze about 10 minutes after us. We had some ice-cream and then drove to the Rotorua Redwood Forest where we embarked on an hours hike through the forest. We hadn't actually planned it but it was on the way back from the maze so we figured, why not.. And it was good! The forest was beautiful and we had formed a nice group and were having fun hanging out. It was cool. After a Burger Fuel meal for lunch, we were not in the mood for dinner (burger fuel is amazing. The burgers are fresh and nice and HUGE. Pretty good.) so we headed for the Spa. The spa is rated one of the nicest in the world and I understand why as it is located on the edge of the Rotorua lake and has many nice relaxing pools to chill in… well, they're boiling hot so not really chill, more like hop in and out of. We chatted to a friendly local about the pools and happily relaxed in the slightly weird smelling pools (the smell was not unpleasant, just different than normal spa/pool water). We went from pool to pool for about 3 hours and then finally, after having spotted star signs like Orion and a diamond-on-a-stick like one we headed back to the hostel and I am now so tired I will gratefully fall asleep. Zzzz.