Rotorua

Hey all, we are now in Rotorua, the smelly city. It really is, there is a pervading odour of sulphur in the air pretty much all the time. Anyway, after our Hobbiton adventure we hopped a bus to Rotorua. Determined not to make our travel day a wasted one we got of the bus and hit the ground running. We checked into our backpackers, ditched our increasingly heavy bags, rented yet another car and headed out. We actually picked up the car and parked it at the backpackers then walked around town. We had been staying out of tourist trap souvenier shops, but we finally caved and checked out a few. Aaaannnnd we may or may not have splurged a bit. Got a few small things for the kids back home (super cute by the way) and touristy though it may be, we picked up a t-shirt. The quote on it is a bit morbid, but totally true and damn funny. We also went to the jade factory and I got myself a chain with a pendant and some earings, and Miles got himself a set of Jade dogtags which are pretty cool looking. Then we decided that we had had enough shopping to suit us for quite a while and jumped into the car and headed to Hanmurana Springs. Its about a 20 min drive from our hostel just around lake Rotorua. It is the largest spring in the north Island pumping out an amazing 450 000 L of water every hour. We weren't really sure what to expect when we got there, but it certainly wasn't what we found. We had thought "oh that might be kind of neat" well it was really beautiful. You come up to the start of the trail and there is a bridge over this creek thats about 16 ft wide and has an assortment of Ducks and geese swimming along. Which is pretty but not amazing, the amazing part is when you look into the water and it is so completely clear its like its not even there. You can see trout swimming through the plants and across the rocky bottom and its as though they are just suspended in midair. Neither of us has ever seen water that clear in our lives. It puts the water in the rocky mountains to shame. I thought that was clear water but it doesn't even come close. And where it reaches any depth it is the most amazing blue. We spent probably 2 and a half hours walking a 1 1/2 km trail. We just kept staring and trying to get a photo that would do it justice. I'm not sure we ever did. Once we reached the headwaters, it became apparant how the spring could pump out that much water, there was a 15m deep hole that was about three and a half feet in diameter that pumped out a steady flow of water strong enought to move small pebbles straight up in its current out of the ground.

We had wanted to go white water rafting while here in Rotorua, as the Kaituna river boasts class 5 rapids (which you cannot do commercially in Canada anymore) and the worlds tallest commercially rafted waterfall which is 7m tall. unfortunately due to heavy rains the last while, the river is closed to rafting and because of the swell of water the waterfall is only 2m high. so we have postponed that and are going to make a second stop in Rotorua near the end of our trip to take it in then.
We did however get to do Waitomo glowworm caves. We now have a conundrum, we aren't sure which we enjoy more, scuba diving or caving. Even after diving in Tutukaka, a world renound dive site, the first words out of my mouth when we came out of the cave at Waitomo were "that is quite possibly THE coolest thing I have done in my whole life". What an experience. Charlene told me to do it, she took a tour when she was here a few years ago and she said it was an amazing trip, but that was the understatement of the century. Those caves were amazing times a million!!!!!!
There are a few different ways to see the caves, there is the dry walking tour, there is the wet "Labryinth" tour, and there is the extreme wet adrenaline rush "Abyss" tour. We did the Abyss tour. Going into it we thought "wow thats kind of expensive" but coming out, it was well worth it. We got doubly lucky, when we got to the office to sign in and do the waiver etc etc. the girl at the desk was like "do you want to wait until the 11:30 tour instead of the 10:00 tour? You are the only two booked for the 10:00 tour" to which our response was "SWEET! No we'll definitely take the 10:00 tour thanks" And we are both SO glad we did. Because we didn't have to wait for 6 extra people to suit up and get sorted out or wait for more people to get down the ropes or do the flying fox (zipline). We got to see 80% of the entire cave system that is open to the public which is more than any one tour ususally sees. We got to do the entire "Abyss" tour as well as portions of the other two tours as well. Our guide had us climbing over railings and doing sections of the cave he hadn't taken a tour group into in years. He himself had done them on his free time, but not with a group. Our day started with an abseil. As we learned, this is like rapelling. So we walk up this hill to a small metal platform over what looks like a large boulder surrounded by rainforest. Then we get a better look and realize that behind that boulder is a oval shape hole, its widest diameter about 3 feet and its narrowest about 20 inches. Dangling into that hole was a half inch rope that dissappeared into darkness. So after a couple practise runs down a steep hill our harnesses were strapped onto this rope and we were told to "bend your knees and drop off the edge. We'll see you at the bottom." Though I hid it very well, I was having a bit of a panic attack. I was like "you want me to just step off that platform attached to this tiny rope and drop into a hole in the ground barely big enough to fit through that goes to God knows where????" I made Miles go first which suited him just fine as he would rather just go and not watch someone else have issues with it because that makes him nervous. My legs were shaking so bad I wasn't sure I'd be able to walk out onto the platform. After watching Miles do it though, I stopped shaking and actually did pretty well. It helped that I was so light that I had to actually pull myself down the rope to move at all, no worries about plummetting to my death for me!  Once we hit the bottom it was smooth sailing. We walked a few hundred feet of cave then got to a zipline. Our guide hooked us on and then we all shut off our headlamps and did it in the dark. which was REALLY cool because you could see all the glowworms as you whizzed by, and you had no idea how far you were going to go before you stopped abruptly and the other guide turned on his lamp and unhooked you.  From there we were given inner tubes and we jumped off the edge of the rock into a murky underground river and floated downstream checking out Glowworms as wer passed. Of course no matter how pretty they look from afar, the reality of glowworms is that they are basically the maggots of giant flies-on-steroids with glow in the dark shit, as our guide so eloquently put it, and you just can't put that on the brochure. From there we got to do some of the extras. We got to climb up 3 underground water falls, jump off of a waterfall, do a "wet" tight squeeze called the re-birth, we climbed the rails of a walkway and did part of the "dry tour" that goes through a beautiful cavern with huge stalactites and stalagmites, flowrock and cave coral, and in a part of the cave not normally seen, we climbed down through a crevice that was maybe 18 inches wide, narrower in some spots, I'm still not sure how Miles even fit through some of those, as I had difficulty. Andy said he didn't usually take tours there at all, but we were in good shape and had done some of the other challenges easily and with agility, so he took us. After we made it through there successfully, he told us that they used that location to train for emergency evacuations with a neck or back injury. He said that the procedure took over 4 hours to get someone with those injuries from that spot out to open air for an airlift to hospital. The shocking part was that the entry way took us about 15 seconds to walk to on foot. Thats why he doesn't take most tours to that location, if there was an injury it would be serious and rescue efforts are extremely difficult. So on that note we turned away from the cave exit and crawled into a tunnel that let us back to the bowels of the earth- 65m below the surface. Along our travels we came to a particularly clear stream that pooled a little bit. In that pool we saw an eel, probably about a foot and a half long (kind of hard to tell through flowing water with only headlamps) Andy, our guide, splashed his fingers on the surface and the eel came up to investigate. They call him Cecsil (spelling?) and he is a permanent resident of that cave section and is estimated to be about 30 years old. We were told that for the most part he wont bite, but to keep our fingers out of the water as he may think they were food and try to take them off........ We kept our fingers tucked under our armpits for a little bit. We also saw a rather large creepy spider that I hurried away from and a huge group of cave wetas. Most of them were about the size of  the tip of my baby finger to the first knuckle, but there was one whose body was as long and as big around as Miles thumb. While I found them fascinating and wanted to look at them a bit longer, I was sitting well away from them where as Miles was right underneath them with the cave roof about six inches from his head. He told me to get the hell moving or he was going first. I got moving. The tour ended with a slow gentle float along the river in the dark looking at the mesmerizing lights of the glowworms.
Yesterday we decided to check out some of the geothermal activity that makes Rotorua famous. We took in the burried village, the site of the tours that took people to see the "eighth wonder of the world" the pink and white terraces in the 1800s. Until June 10th 1886 when Mt. Tarawera erupted destroying the famous terraces, tearing a rift up the entire valley and covering the land with up to 20 meters of boiling hot mud and volcanic ash. within 5 hours, all life in the valley had been completely wiped out. Over a hundred years later there are only photographs and paintings of the terraces, and one village has been dug out by archeaologists and a museum set up to tell about the volcanic activity and the history of the area. There is also a gorgeous waterfall just a few minutes walk from the museum and dig site. From the museum we headed down the hiway to some of the thermal reserves. We checked out Waimangu volcanic valley, the newest geothermal region in the world. It houses the largest hot water spring in the world in the form of frying pan lake whose surface temperature is 55 degrees celcius, and has temperatures at vents and inlets that reach 97 degrees. There was also Inferno Crater which is the largest guyser type feature in either the world, the southern hemisphere or New Zealand.... I can't remember which. Its not really a guyser to look at it, its a crater lake that fills and empties itself every 38 days. The reason it is called a guyser feature is because there IS a guyser, it is just far below water level, so you don't see it shooting up, you just see the resulting flux of the water levels in the pool. The water itself is about 33 degrees and very acidic, the pH level is usually somewhere between 2.5 and 2.1. The color is what is really remarkable. It is a bright vibrant blue, a little bit like lake Louise, but a bit lighter. That was really pretty to see, to be honest though, the rest of the thermal reserve wasn't all that remarkable, there were some silica terraces, similar to the historical pink and white terraces but on a much smaller scale, but the rest was pretty much a bush walk, and a very hot one at that what with hot water lakes, creeks and steam vents heating the valley as well as the intense sun. So yes it was neat, but for what we saw and what it cost, I'm not sure I'd recommend it. So with sore feet, and tired hot bodies and a little bit disappointed we left the Waimangu valley and headed for a place called Kerosene Creek. This had been recommended to us by the Irish fellow we met back in Thames- and rather sternley dis-recommended (that is so not a word) to us by the guy at the information center here. He suggested we not go there because it isn't safe to put your head underwater, well seing as the water is only about a foot to two feet deep and smells just like its namesake, that wasn't really an issue. I wasn't putting my head in that water no matter what. And I am really glad we did go there. it was SO cool. you're walking along this rainforest trail with this creek gurgling along beside you (and a hint of kerosene odour in the air but ignore that) and everything is bright and green. And then you come to a place where the creek pools and widens and there is a waterfall. Thats when you notice that the water is steaming slightly. So we dipped our toes in and WOW its warm! Its not hot enough to burn your bum like at hot water beach, its the perfect temperature, like a nice warm bath, and talk about ambience! Gorgeous rainforest setting with clear water and a coarse sand bottom or volcanic rock flows. Really, except for the noxious odour, it was perfect. We have since decided that some of the best things in life really are free :) There were  a few other groups of people there too, so we swapped cameras around and took photos for each other and generally just enjoyed the warm water.
Which brings us to today, and as it is still morning, we haven't done a whole lot yet. We'll let you know what the next few days adventures bring when we next find computers and internet access. Miles is currently uploading some photos, so hopefully we'll get to post those.
Cheers,
Miles and Bri