Sledging Your Bets!

Kev woke up the morning after the Tongariro crossing with no aching bones, no sore feet, no nothing!! So there went my second lazy day by the pool!! Deep down I was thinking, surely he's going to be in pain after that marathon and he's going to want to stay in Taupo another night just chilling by the pool – but no! So before I knew it we were off! We packed up the van and drove to Huka Falls for a quick sight seeing stop. They were actually way more impressive than I thought they were going to be. I remember when I went to Niagra Falls in Canada, I thought to myself, hmm, it's nice, but it's just a whole heap of water falling off a cliff. So, you can imagine that I wasn't holding out too much hope for New Zealand's Huka Falls. But I was wrong. Huka Falls are awesome. They're not high like Niagra, but the amount of water that is squishing itself through the small valley is amazing and I couldn't help but be in awe of it, I could have gazed at it for hours to be honest! The power of the water is so obvious and the turquoise blue water gets transformed into a white froth as it lands in the machine machine like pit at the bottom. It really makes you appreciate the power of the water there, much more than when I was in Canada to be honest – sounds silly, I know!

After Huka Falls we went to Craters of the Moon, on the outskirts of Taupo. It was cheap to get in and it was basically a wooden path around a thermal area. There were strict warning to keep on the path in case you burnt your feet. We wandered around the steaming pit of craters and it was really fascinating ,but the weather was getting warmer and being surrounded by all that steam was making me too hot for my liking. I kept saying to Kev, 'are you're feet boiling', because mine were and it was only afterwards that I realised I was burning the back of my legs as we walked round as I was wearing a skirt and the stupid natural thermal heat from the ground was taking it's vengeance out on my poor little milk bottle legs! It was OK though, because as soon as we were back in the van I could see the red rash appearing on my legs and I caught it in time, chucked on some trousers and a whole ton of Sudacrem (thanks for the tip Matthew about bring that with us, turns out we didn't need it for the chaffing as you had suggested, but came in just as handy for burns – good times!)

Back in the van and we were heading to Rotarua but we needed to decide which of the many thermal parks to stop off at along the way – there's so many to chose from on the way to Rotarua and various people had given us their tips on which were the best. Thankfully, we stopped at Orekui Korako (now that is totally the wrong spelling but I know the place begins with an O and then a K and I can't be bothered to dig the map out to tell you the right spelling!!) and pulled up in the car park only to see that it cost a fortune and you had to get a ferry across to this 'hidden wonderland' which Lonely Planet had supposedly described as like the best place ever! Well, we'd learn along our travels that you can't trust a Lonely Planet recommendation as they love everything (I suspect they're on commission). So we decided to check out the postcards in the gift shop to make our decision whether it was worth paying the money to get the ferry across to the hidden valley. All the postcards showed the view that we could see from the gift shop anyway and a few other pics which didn't look too dissimilar to Craters of the Moon. So we decided to give this one a miss and we headed on down to Thermal Wonderland.

And we totally chose the best one to go to. Thermal Wonderland stinks, but is really worth the reasonable price they charge (cheaper than most of the others and all the locals agree it's the best by far – or fart – ha ha, that's a Rosy joke, because that's how it smells, ha, I've made myself laugh now!!) So anyway, sorry, thermal wonderland has massive clouds of sulphurous gases that engulf you and huge pools of either mud or pea green soup coloured lava. There's a huge lake in the middle where the water is bubbling at like 'I dread to think how hot that is' degrees and the gasses blowing off it (ha, blowing off!! sorry I didn't even plan that, ha– you should see the photos we took if you want to realise how much of a child I am) are like bright orange. So yeah, it's a cool place but we raced around because the smell was pretty overpowering.

Back in the van and we were off on the road to Rotarua, which I must add smells real bad, not the van, but Rotarua, although the van's starting to get a bit funky now after 3 weeks too! Anyhoo! So we arrived at the Rotarua information centre and for the first time the lady behind the desk admitted that even though we're not meant to we could get away with just camping out for free in a car park somewhere. I still wasn't keen on parking up on the side of the road, but then she directed us to a cheap backpackers hostel which has a camping area. It turned out to be the cheapest and best place we've stayed the whole trip. We get to use all the youth hostel facilities for hardly any money – needless to say we've taken advantage and stayed here three nights!

The following morning we had a much needed lie in. I was feeling like I had a cold – I've honestly never had so many colds as while I've been away travelling! So I needed a lie in and a day to chill out. We took a drive to the Agroadventures centre, which is basically just a farm that thought to itself 'hang on a minute, New Zealand is doing pretty well out of tourism and here we are just milking a few cows and sheering a few sheep – let's milk a few tourists instead and sheer their wallets by building some rubbish rides and call it Extreeeeme dude!'. We weren't totally blown, ha, sorry, away by their adrenaline attempts at rides, although it was pretty good to watch the original Zorbs – the big inflatable hamster wheels that you get into and then roll down a hill, arriving at the bottom 2 seconds later and about 50 bucks poorer! Didn't bother having a go because if money was endless then yeah you'd do all these things, but adrenaline junkies like me can get pretty poor pretty quickly here unless you reign yourself in once in a while and sometimes you've just got to think, hmm, someone here is ripping you off!

We went back into the centre of Rotarua for a wander round, but it smells bad here of sulphur, in fact the park on the way to town is just a big puddle of bubbling mud, not dissimilar to the bog of eternal stench in David Bowie's Labyrinth. And the town centre is pretty rubbish to be honest. One thing we've noticed for sure here is that crime is an issue in the north island, where in the south you begin thinking you're living in Heartbeat where there's one police man for like the whole island. You didn't even have to think about locking the van door, or leaving your valuables in the car, let alone wandering around at night – it's totally safe in the south. But here in the north, you suddenly see a lot of police and the menacing looking teenagers make it obvious that it's not as safe here as you'd like and the constant reminders to 'lock it or lose it' are a stark warning to anyone thinking the north is like the south. The people in the north aren't as friendly here, but probably because in the south it seems literally everyone works in tourism, it seems that that's all there is there (sorry, that's probably really offensive to anyone from there), so it seems that they all really like tourists, but in the north, there's a few that work in tourism and then there's the rest who just have normal jobs so not everyone here welcomes you because not everyone here's job depends on you!

So yet another early night and we had to be up early this morning for White Water River Sledging. Now, I had been really surprised when Kev said we should do this because I was thinking, Kev hates these kind of things. It turns out Kev really didn't want to do this but he knew I'd totally regretted not doing it when I had the chance in Queenstown and he didn't want me missing out again so he pretended he was up for having a go!! Bless him!! I would have done it on my own, but he said he wanted to challenge himself anyway!! We arrived at the White Water Rafting place and while some of the group went off to do the rafting, me, Kev and three other guys went off to get wetsuited up and to be introduced to our boards.

Our boards were literally sledges that we were told to never let go of because we were about to get into grade 3 rapids and these boards would provide 70% of our buoyancy. I knew people died doing White Water Rafting which is why we'd chosen not to do that, and I thought the sledging was the safer option. When I joked with our guide that Sledging isn't really that hard, is it? I was disappointed to see his face turn very stark as he replied 'people die doing all these sports on white water!', this was not what I wanted to hear and Mum, you'll be glad to hear I survived and won't be doing it again, so breath a sigh of relief!!
Without doubt, it turned out this was more dangerous than me jumping out of the sky! The first part was the scariest for me as we were told to take a flying leap into the river. I knew I was in for trouble when 1) I couldn't even pick up my sledge to carry it to the river, and 2) I could barely bring myself to take this flying leap into the water. We did jump in though and we steered ourselves into the first Eddy at the side of the river where we could catch our breath for a second. There Kev decided he didn't want to do any more, but the guides weren't having any of that – they told him 'he was going to do this' and that was that, but he was earmarked as one of the ones to keep an eye on. I, on the other hand was still feeling pretty excited but I still had some learning to do. We all had to practice the essential flips that we would need to do if our sledge filled up with water. I struggled to do my practice flip and wasn't too happy when Andy, our guide, said, 'hmm, yeah you're going to struggle because you're vertically challenged' – turned out, the sledge was bigger than my body!! So that we me earmarked as another one to keep an eye on – good luck to the other three guys because our two guides were now assigned to me and Kev and they were out there on their own!!

So we spent the next 45 mins sledging down some rapids and it was great fun (although I don't think Kev would agree). I was just disappointed that my size meant I couldn't really do any of it on my own. I went down one rapid on my own and ended up under water with my board on top of me thinking 'hmmm, somehow I've got to lift this thing out of the water and away from myself, when I couldn't even lift it on dry land....this could be a problem', but survival is a funny thing and somehow I managed to do it. Kev said I was under the water for like a couple of seconds, but to me it felt like ages. It was awesome fun though. We got out just before the river turned into a grade 6 waterfall which all of us were petrified of accidentally drifting down.

A few bruised arms and elbows later and we were on dry land and Kev was able to release every muscle in his body from the constantly tensed position that he had spent the last hour in (and the last night he later admitted to me as he had been silently bricking it since the day before!!). Kev was in more pain from that work out that from his epic trek across the wilderness in Taupo – horses for courses as they say, there's no way I could have done that trek, but I enjoyed the white water.... never again though. Our guide kept saying Mauri prayers to the river as we went down and at the end I was very thankful to still have my life and I won't be taking that chance again in a hurry).

We came back to the campsite and had a well deserved beer before heading to the Skyline of Rotarua. Basically, the Skyline is a gondola ride up a huge mountain which gives you amazing views of the lake here. I didn't really want to do the gondola ride, but I did want to do the luge ride at the top and you can't have one without the other. So we got in the gondola and headed up the slope. At the top we got in our little three wheel sledge thing (you'd have thought we'd have had enough of sledges, but this one had brakes, so we liked it!) Then we shot down the mountain side, Kev much faster than me, along the slalom style track. First we took the obligatory practice scenic route and at the bottom we got on the ski lift back up to the top – wasn't keen on the ski lift at first as I wasn't too comfortable being about 50m above the ground on nothing more than a high tech basket on a rope, but I got used to it.

Next luge ride we took the intermediate course as we were getting a bit cocky and were in need of our next adrenaline fix. This trip was over too soon and so the next ride down we did the scenic one, but a bit faster – I think Kev was trying to race me at one point but I was having none of that, hand constantly on the break thinking to myself, 'I've only got short sleeves on, oohhh, if I come off this, that is going to hurt!!'. I think I have a misplaced sense of danger as I loved going down rapids on a river that many people have died on on nothing more than a bit of plastic, but put me on a toboggan which is suitable for 8-year-old children and ohhh, my mind suddenly recognises danger – bonkers.

By the end of all that we were exhausted so we headed to the supermarket to pick up dinner – a huge bag of massive NZ live mussels which I just cooked successfully all by myself and hopefully will not kill me by the morning! Kev didn't eat any so he shall report in my food poisoned absence if need be!! Met some lovely guys from Switzerland who will be camping around the world for 2 years – mad as hatters! Good stories they had to tell though, but no, three more nights in the van is enough for me.

So while not too much to tell on this blog though I'd better get up to date as we're not sure when we'll have email again, probably not until Auckland on Friday. Heading off to Hobbiton tomorrow (hmmm, I've never even managed to stay awake through a whole Lord of the Rings film, so not sure how I'll get on looking round the film set!!) and then onto a beautiful beach called Whangamata for a couple of nights. Dropping the van off on Friday and then Staying in a real bed in a hostel in Auckland for two nights – a real bed, imagine that!!

Looking forward to hearing from you all soon. Big kisses xxxxx