Hooray for Japanese Friends!

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After the success of yesterday's adventures in the thermal park, today was something of an anticlimax. It had turned cold and cloudy again so our enthusiasm for a grand day out simply didn't materialise. Instead we spent a few hours walking around town, browsing in a few shops and generally not doing very much at all. Rotorua really didn't have anything more to offer us and it seemed liek a relief that we would be moving on tomorrow.

Things picked up again in the evening when we bumped into Lina (pronounced like Leighna!), one of the Japanese girls that Glynn had been talking to yesterday evening. She was alone this time so I spent a while getting to know her while Glynn took his turn in the kitchen making dinner. It turned out that Lina is in New Zealand studying English and she purposefully left her comfortable homestay to live in the hostel where she could talk to more English people. The sad thing is that other than the other Japanese girl we had seen her with last night, no-one had really spoken to her. I couldn't believe how awful this was and felt particularly bad because of all the kind, friendly people we had met in Japan.

Lina seemed really lonely so Glynn and I invited her to join us in our little lounge room for a beer after dinner. We spent hours talking and laughing, sharing stories about our experiences in Japan and Thailand, where she had also visited. It was a lovely evening and before we knew it, it was 1am. By this time, we had discussed spending more time together over the weekend so all plans for leaving Rotorua in the morning were suddenly no longer necessary. The only problem was that we had emailed a reservation through to a hostel in Taupo that would need to be cancelled, so in the small hours of Saturday morning, we ended up traipsing down to the only late night internet cafe in town to sort things out.

As it turned out, the hostel hadn't replied to our email so there was nothing to cancel. Just as well we had decided to stay! It was gone 2am by the time we got back to the hostel and by then the coach reservation line was closed so I couldn't cancel the seat reservations I had made for the morning. Luckily we managed to catch the owners who were still up and about and checked whether we could keep our room for an extra 2 days, which we could. After a short night's sleep, I got up at 7.30am to cancel the bus seats, which thankfully was no problem either. It seemed that we were destined to stay in Rotorua after all and now, thanks to our new friend, we really didn't mind.

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