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Published: April 17th 2010
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It seems that New Zealand is a lot bigger than we initially thought ... and our time spent on the south island left us only eight nights in Bertha to explore the north island once our brief stop in Welly was over. Unfortunately this meant sitting down and planning out a vague route of where we were going to head, what we could fit in and what we could miss ... doubly unfortunately this means making lots of decisions, not really our forte! So after an unbearable evening of sulks, strops, stony silences and the occasional decision being made, we were ready to leave Wellington and head straight up to Taupo ... a whole day of driving, but getting us half way up the island straight away.
In reality we never quite made it to Taupo that day, as we found ourselves a place 50km away where we could freedom camp for the night on the edge of the Tongario National Park. The lady in the i-site assured me that there were toilets there, but when we arrived there was no sign of any facilities at all, hmmm. After fifteen hours of relieving ourselves in the bushes whenever nature called,
we left the next morning Taupo-bound only to see someone heading straight for the toilets that were there after all, bugger!
The camp was actually a marina on the edge of the lake - it made for some magnificient views, especially when the sky started to turn a deep shade of red. Beautiful. The North island has some spectacular sunsets, almost rivalling those that Thailand offers.
Apart from the beauty of the lake (which is the product of a huge volcanic explosion many many years ago) we didn’t really spend long enough in Taupo to rate it. Matt had a go at winning us $10,000 using his enviable (I joke) golf skills trying to get a hole in one, aiming for a small floating board 111 yards into the lake. His first shot was his best, the rest were rubbish. Apparently someone wins something once every two weeks but Matt has a theory that they just block up the golf holes...yeah right, as if anyone could get near enough to it anyway. Yeah yeah, my golf needs a little bit of practise. We also went to visit Huka Falls and for a little walk around this place called
The Craters Of The Moon ... an over-the-top description of what is really a boardwalk around lots of crazy geothermal things ... Cate’s inner-geographer emerged as we came across steaming-craters, bubbling mud pools and other crazy things that are all occur in the area (Taupo, Rotorua and the surrounding areas are a geothermal hot-spot, if you’ll excuse the pun, where all the volcanic goings on under the ground happen really close to the surface).
The one thing that we (well,I) did partake in before leaving Taupo was a bit of jet boating, which basically involves speeding down a river at ridiculously quick speeds in a specially designed boat (the Hamilton jet boat, with an engine with no external parts which makes it really quick, really manoeuvrable, and can run in only 5cm of water) and doing lots of crazy stunts like 360 degree turns and driving so close to cliff faces that it feels like you’re going to crash. Oh, and also, the jet boating outfit that I chose does all of this on white water rapids too ... awesome! It all sounded a bit too hair-raising for Cate, so I was billy-no-mates in the boat of ten or
so people as we whizzed up and down the river, riding rapids, spinning around and generally getting very wet - all good fun.
I thought I might end up throwing up in someone’s face if I got on that boat so I decided to save us some money and take the time away from Matt (a rarity) to read my book in peace without constant interruptions. Bliss.
We decided that we would head towards Rotoroa, further north and after driving for a while, seeing some (more) beautiful landscapes, we set up camp in a campsite which was basically a bit like a small forest. As we were cooking, a man drove his van up to us - we thought he might tell us to move on (although it was a proper place to stay) but instead he asked us if we were camping overnight and that he was just checking out who his neighbours were. I know it doesn’t sound strange and I’m going to say a particularly girly thing here - it was strange and freaky because of the way he said it. And the fact that we were in a dark wooded area didn’t help either. I think we both thought he was going to come and kill us, chop us up into many pieces and boil us up for his supper. We made a pact not to go outside alone and hoped he wouldn’t come anywhere near us. Unfortunately there were some strange noises outside the van, very close to us which freaked us out even more and when the sun rose the following morning, we were extremely grateful that we were still alive and kicking. Phew. I kid you not; it was like the beginning of a horror film, a young couple stopping for the night in their van during a care-free holiday in a foreign land only to fall victim to the weird local man who lives in the woods.
Relieved to have made it through the night we headed for Rotorua, a much more geothermally active place than Taupo ... you can literally smell it in the air; the rotten egg smell of sulphur lingers over the town as a (pretty disgusting) constant reminder of all the activity beneath the surface. No matter how nice a place is, I don’t see how people put up with that smell all day every
day, yuck.
It was a bit off-putting to say the least and we didn’t spend much time there either. After doing our usual trick of going to the I-site, finding out as much information about what there is to do in the place as we can, we then decided that we wouldn’t actually pay any money to do anything. The main thing that you can do in Rotorua is go to one of the many places that offer mud baths and hot mineral pools but as we have had the mud bath experience already (in Vietnam) and we recently went to Hanmer Springs to experience the mineral pools, we thought we’d not bother again...trying to reign in our spending. We spent some time in the library on the internet and used their electricity to charge the camera battery and netbook and read another comic - this time I read all about the death of Captain America
, then drove to a park in town to enjoy the sunshine and wander around. The park was really good - it was a similar sort of thing to the Craters of the Moon walk but we didn’t have to pay $6 each for the pleasure. There was heaps of bubbling mud to admire - it looks and sounds really cool - a very real reminder of the strength of the earth.
We had to make the decision as to where to go next as neither of us were keen on staying in Rotorua as after just a couple of hours we were sick of the stench so after much deliberation, we decided to head towards Waitomo on the West coast where we would be able to go caving to see some glow worms. I thought I’d phone one of the campsites in a nearby town to see how much they charged to stay for the night and the very talkative man told me how there was a ‘muster’ going on the following day in the next village along, Te Kuiti. Apparently this little village held an annual event involving sheep shearing competitions and they let many sheep out on the (closed off) main road to run along it. Strange but true. It’s known as the ‘Sheep shearing capital of the world’. What a title to have.
Thinking that it might be cool to see, we drove straight to Te Kuiti to a
rubbishy little campsite (cold piddley showers,) stayed overnight then got up the next morning to check out the festivities.
Cate and Matt x
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