Rafting Rotorua

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We weren't in Rotorua for very long, especially as we weren't keen on the smell! More sulphur pools everywhere and the whole town stinks of rotten eggs! (Although now we are writing from Bangkok with MUCH worse smells!).

We did have enough time to throw ourselves down the luge several times - wahoo! It's much longer than the Queenstown one, but perhaps not quite as many twists and turns and crikey-I-just-left-my-seat moments. We spent a happy couple of hours up there though. Unfortunately the zorbing was closed due to the wind (the wind stops a lot of activities in NZ we found!). Then we headed back to the campsite after booking a morning on the white water rapids for the next day.

We had a meal at the Fat Dog Cafe which had come recommended by Westi and Helga - it was a funky place and had enormous portions, perhaps too enormous really. And it was heaving in there as it was Haloween and everyone was out. We shared our table with some nice enough Kiwis and then rolled back to the campsite to get an early night.

The next morning we were up bright and early and raced off to the (Otago?) falls to do our white water rafting. We had carefully booked the most extreme trip we could! White water rivers are graded 1-5, with 5 being the most extreme - I think there is actually a grade 6 but it's not commercially raftable. So this one, grade 5 of course, included the largest commercially raftable waterfall - a staggering 7 metres - that we were going to have to get ourselves down.

We were both really excited about it and it sounded like a lot of fun, although as soon as we were got on the river I completely lost my cool and my days of getting turned upside-down and stuck under thundering water in canoes at school came flooding back... fortunately we made our way over the 3m fall without tipping the raft up, bit it was pretty hairy. The 7m one I can quite honestly say I was practically in tears about when we sat there sizing it up - there was absolutely no way in the world I wanted to go over it. Our raft was only 3.5m and it was a 6/7 man raft so that puts it in perspective. Anyway we carefully listened to every word our instructor told us and when we got to the top and he said 'DOWN' we crammed ourselves into the centre of the raft, tucked our chins in and prayed to every God out there that we would make it over without flipping the raft. A good few seconds and a lot of white water later, we somehow popped out the other side the right way up! Although looking at the pictures again now I still don't know how we did it. And my nose was streaming blood 😞 In fact I think it was broken as it still hurts now 😞 All in all, Rich absolutely loved it, I have to say I wasn't so keen. Ah well, it was our last adventure at least and a pretty big one!

We spent the rest of the day driving up to the Coromandel Peninsula which was another very long drive, not due to the distance but due to the very steep winding roads. We also had to stop along the way and sort out our Fiji holiday as the accommodation we thought we had booked had come up to be a completely different price to what we were expecting (quoted Fiji dollars on the phone and then US dollars by e-mail aargh!).

Back soon!

C&R xxx

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