Wellington and Taupo

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Ok, so I left it a bit long to write my next blog, so I apologise to all of you who have been waiting to catch up with my adventures (as I write this I am actually in NYC, but never mind eh?!)

Wellington was rather uneventful - it is meant to be the windiest city in NZ or similar, and we definitely experienced that as soon as we arrived there! Headed to the cinema on our first day there to see What Happens in Vegas and then tried to sneak into Iron Man as well (Wayne wanted to watch it, not me!), but ended up watching the new Indiana Jones film, so we left after ten minutes (after the bit where he rolls out of the fridge - hmmm not at all unbelievable?!) We took the cable car up the mountain to see great views of the city, but it was absolutely freezing cold and quite miserable, so we didn't end up walking through the Botanic Gardens. We also stopped in at Mac's Brewery to have a beer or two - yum!

Probably the best thing we did was go to 'Te Papa', a museum which has various NZ-based exhibitions and where you can learn all about the history of the Maori, how various immigrants journeyed their way to NZ, how earthquakes and volcanoes occur due to the interaction of the tectonic plates beneath NZ and so on. We left Wellington after a couple of days to journey onto Taupo - and just as well we did as we heard the day after we left there were terrible storms - good timing or what?!

On arrival in Taupo, we decided to do Black Water Rafting in Waitomo which is about two hours bus ride away. Black Water rafting isn't actually that similar to White Water Rafting - it's navigating your way through caves sitting on a rubber ring in the water, occasionally jumping down waterfalls, looking at glow-worms (more to reveal about that later) and abseiling down into caves (which we didn't do as it was really expensive). The day we picked to do it was absolutely FREEZING, and we had to strip down to swimming costumes etc and put on wetsuits (which were wet already), booties, a fleece, a jacket (surprisingly warm once we got all of our clothes on) and helmets complete with headtorches - we did look a sight! We were driven up to the start of the caves, told to grab a rubber ring and practise a waterfall jump - we had to jump backwards off a little jetty into the river which wasn't even that high, but as soon as you landed in the water, it seemed to engulf you!

We clambered over some rocks once we had got down into the caves and wound our way around the caves, following and listening to our mad Kiwi guides, who told us the secret behind glow-worms...there is no such thing as a glow-worm! Apparently it's just a marketing ploy - what you see in the dark is basically maggot pooh haha! After recovering from our astonishment, we played 'find your way out of the caves in the dark', which was rather interesting, and then finished up with some hot soup and bagels after the trip. We then had a couple of hours to kill in Waitomo, so we wandered slowly towards the village, stopping off at a rabbit-shearing place on the way and chatting to the owner for ages, and then headed to the bar to play pool until we were picked up and taken back to Taupo, which we really didn't see a lot of!

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Photos

Waitomo
Looks like good ol' English countryside to me!