Intern Trip to Rotorua

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Intern organised a weekend in Rotorua where we did white water rafting and Luging! We left on the Saturday and around 60 interns turned up! Upon arrival, there were so many of us, only half could do the white water rafting on the Saturday so I made sure I got my name down as it was a really warm and sunny day. And also the group doing it the next day had to do it at 7.30am!

Rafting was awesome! The instructors were quite funny as they spoke with really strong Kiwi slang that you don’t really hear in Auckland. Had a nice Maori cultural experience before we got into the river as our instructor said a Maori prayer (something along the lines of respecting the river and it will look after us). I was sat in the front and we learnt all the basic instructions before going down the first drop of 1.5m. This got the adrenaline going as we knew there was a 7m coming up later on! (The highest commercial drop in the world.) Out of all the Intern boats, we were last to go, after 3/5 had tipped on the 7m drop. I can proudly say we stayed upright, but lost one of the Dutch girls and another oar! It was pretty crazy going down as it didn’t look as high as 7m. You feel totally lost after going over and all you can see is white water everywhere with a big impact on landing.

After we went back to the shack where the rafting company was based and chilled out in the afternoon sun with a BBQ and a bit of footie and volleyball. Rotorua is known for its geothermal activity and also has so much to do and see (I was there the week before Zorbing and will probably go back another couple of times).

We spent that night in the hostel bar with our massive group of interns, but as half had to get up at 7am for their rafting, quite a few left by 1am and an hour later I said bye to couple of other people and found I was the only one of our group left! There was tennis/footie on TV so I just stayed and watched that for a bit as I was wide awake after drinking ‘Vodka Mothers’ (basically vodka and energy drink with a unique name). I saw an advert on TV about the Chelsea Villa game at 5am (Kiwi time) so I asked the guy at the bar if he would show it but said the bar closes at 3am. I found out he was also a Chelsea fan! (Well he claimed to be – typical foreigner who switches teams as he used to ‘support’ Liverpool and couldn’t really ‘talk football’). He was a really cool guy though and was pouring me free drinks for the rest of the night for being a Chelsea fan! So knocked back a few drinks which I didn't really have a clue what they were - some green jagerbomb style drinks. When the bar shut we found a place to watch the game but I fell asleep before it even started and woke up in the 70th minute! I was out the night before (and up early to leave for the trip) so the lack of sleep eventually caught up on me as the vodka mothers wore off. So got back to the hostel at 7.30am and then up at 8.30am! Nice.........

On Sunday morning we walked through some geysers and mud pools before going on to Luging! Unfortunately the weather has pretty bad – wet and windy! – but made for some exciting racing conditions! After doing a tame ‘scenic track’, the next two progressive ones were a lot more fun!

So that was the end of a busy Rotorua weekend which consisted of around 5 hours sleep, fuelled on alcohol and adrenaline activities! (Typical NZ!)

Also check out this video a couple of other Interns made of the trip:

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Photos

Rafting
7m drop!

Comments

[mum]

rotarua
well Leo looks as though it was a fab weekend looks so exciting. Do they have any tamer white water rafting experiences for the oldies? so much snow here. photo to follow soon x skype soon? x