Clan Haley

Rotorua

On the morning of the 27th we packed the car and said a final thank you to Angela, Jamie and Daniel for hosting us for Christmas. It really was lovely and we will always remember our special New Zealand Christmas with them. Our main job was to drive the few hours south of Auckland to our base for the next few days, Rotorua. We stopped at a rather fabulous playpark in Hamilton for lunch. James loved playing with the water flows, creating dams with another little boy he found. Next we headed further south and hit some pretty bad traffic. Our first (but not our last) bit of slow cars. We decided to turn off for a short walk to the blue spring, which was a spectacular fresh water spring. The water takes somewhere between 50 and 100 years to pass through the nearby rocks before surfacing, producing some of the cleanest water in the world! After that we carried on to our campsite where the bad weather started! I managed to get the tent up without getting too soaked while Laura and James cooked dinner.

The next day we headed to the Agrodome. This is a working farm with a permanent agriculural show aspect. We saw a show all about the different types of sheep they farm in New Zealand, along with some other interesting acts. They had Jersey cow on stage for milking, some sheep dogs and James even got to feed a lamb. After that we got a tour round the farm on the back of a tractor. This involved several stops to feed sheep, deer, alpacas and visit some of the other animals they had on the farm. James loved it especially the feeding the rather large lambs food pellets. After that we hopped on a short bus ride to visit a Kiwi Hatchery. There we learnt about the dangers faced by these birds and the efforts that are going into helping them survive. The Hatchery took kiwi eggs from pairs in the wild, incubated them and looked after the young until they reached 1kg in weight (or preditor proof weight). We were fortunate to see a few eggs and a couple of newly hatched Kiwis. Very cool. We returned to our campsite for a soak in the pool before dinner.

The weather we had at the agrodome was pretty good and by that I mean no rain. Over night that changed a lot. We had some torrential rain overnight and into the next day. Luckily our tent was fine and kept us fully waterproofed and dry. Our next day we had tickets to visit Te Puia. This describes itself as a "magnificent geothermal wonderland" which is on a local iwi (or tribes) land. It also house the New Zealand Māori Arts and Crafts Institute where students get taught about traditional ways of crafting materials and preserving ancient tradtions. It was a pretty cool day out. We got a tour round the geothermal park with snippets of info about the people that call it home. We got to see various bubbling mud pools, geysers and other smelly holes. After that rather wet tour we were taken inside for a cultural show. This consisted of several performers showing off traditonal dances, instruments and singing songs. James loved it and said he wanted to "learn all the moves". After a spot of lunch out of the rain we drove into town for a well deserved hot choclate before returning to the campsite (for another swim).

Our weather the next day hadn't improved much. We ventured to the redwood forest for a tree walk suspended 6m in the air. It was pretty cool, but still very wet. We liked the bridges between platforms so much we did the whole thing twice. Before lunch we went for a ground level walk through the giant trees. The rain had eased off and by then it turned into quite a nice day. Our plan was to got to the Skyline luge (like the one in Queenstown), but the wait for each run was almsot an hour. Instead we headed to a cool playpark on the lake shore before some ice cream.

The next morning we packed up our wet tent and went back to the Skyline luge before the crowds arrived. Luckily the wet weather was back so no crowds appeared and we managed some rapid laps of the luge run. There was so much water that the brakes didn't really work, but that only made it all the more exciting. A full (and I mean everything) change of clothes later we were ready to head out of town and said goodbye to Rotorua.