A Thermal Wonderland

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The following morning we headed to Napier, weather was still abit rubbish so couldnt do that much just had a walk around town and checked our emails at a very expensive internet cafe then found a campsite on the beach. The rest of the day was taken up with watching tv and reading our books (you might notice alot of that hapening to fill the days on the north island).

Our next stop was Lake Taupo, not exactly the same as the lakes we'd seen on the south island. Again the weather was extremely miserable so we spent the afternoon in the hot spa pools (joined onto our campsite)- another hard afternoon! The next day was abit dryer so we did a walk up to Hukka falls which was really nice as there were hot springs along the way- which some guys actually got in. The afternoon was taken up with sorting things out on the internet- ie starting to look at fiji and canada.

One of the much talked about places in the guide books was Rotorua and that was our next stop. On the way we stopped at "Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland" to see bubbling gizas and lots of volcanic pools (see photos), it smelt pretty bad because of the sulphur but it was still pretty cool to see. What they forgot to mention about Rotorua was how bad it stank, think rotten eggs and x by 10- really really not nice. Again this was due to the sulphur. The next day we decided to be brave and walk into town as the lady at the campsite said it was only a 20 minutes walk- wrong!!! The "shortcut" she told us to use wasnt so short and it took us past a sewage works- sulphur and sewage are really not a good combination. The town really wasnt that nice and the main things to do here were things like zorbing, bungy jumping and all other adventure stuff that we'd decided we didnt really want to do so you guessed it we spent the rest of the day in the van watching tv.

The next day we had decided we'd had enough of the smell and just needed to get away as fast as possible (with all the windows firmly closed!)............................

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Comments

[Dave Deane]

The smell
That smell just lingers. I still get faint traces of it on some of my clothes nearly a year later. Just doesn't go away. How are the plans for Fiji going?