Rotorua - Taupo

I stayed one night in Rotorua and when I arrived enjoyed a nice swim in a naturally heated swimming pool. It was really lovely although after sometime you did heat up quite a bit!!

The next morning we had an early start, not to good after a late night! This journey was to Taupo. A journey, which normally takes about an hour, took us 5 and a half hours. This included many stops along the way-sometimes too many stops. Our first stop was to see the mud pools located just outside of Rotorua. It was a quick stop to definitely look and not touch otherwise it would have been a very painful experience. After that, we made our way to the ‘Lady Knox Geyser’. This erupted daily-something which I thought was all natural, and was very disappointed to discover that this process involved a man placing something inside the geyser to make it erupt-at 10.30AM. While I was standing waiting for the process to begin, I turned around and saw the people who brought me to Auckland on the Friday night standing right beside me! It was pretty amazing watching the geyser erupt and it was quite pretty too, especially as there was a rainbow in the background.

From there it was on to the geothermal park, which is not a place for those who have very sensitive smell. Leaving the bus, you are greeted with a very strong smell of sulphur-almost as if someone had major wind problems (yes, it did remind me of Shrek!). Once inside there are hundred of different areas of green coloured sulphur pools and red coloured sulphur pools, although I did not walk around all of the pools! It was quite a beautiful and powerful-I’m talking about the smell here- experience!

From there we did the longest part of the journey to Taupo, which lasted about half an hour before those of us who weren’t doing skydiving, were dropped off at a honey centre and left to wait for an hour before our bus driver returned to bring us on again. After tasting all the different types of honey and putting on as much hand crème as is possible there was nothing really left to do and we were left outside longing for the bus to return. Eventually it did and before we were dropped off at our hostels; we paid a visit to the Huka Falls just outside of Taupo, which although very pretty, are nothing compared to what I saw in South America and to the location of where I had my moment of madness the last time I was in Taupo: Taupo Bungy! It was fun being back as a visitor and actually having a chance to look properly at what I had done without worrying if the rope will break or not. From there, we finally were brought to our hostels. I returned to Tiki Lodge to be greeted by some old faces and it felt good to be back there again.