Mark and Nicola: Tuesday Sept 18/07

The last few days has been amazing. We headed south Auckland, first going to the Coromandel Peninsula. We went and saw the beatiful Cathedral Cove and Hot Water Beach. Hot Water Beach has a super hot water spring running right underneath one part of it. If you go during the right time of day you can dig yourself a little pool in the beach and it will fill from the underneath with boiling hot water, litterally. You can run a trench of cold water from the ocean to cool it to a hot tub temperature or dig just to the side of the spring to get a perfectly hot, totally natural hot tub, it was awesome. Our tour has been stopping at tons of little detours and parks and areas of interest, too many to list, almost to many to remember in fact. After the Coromandel we made our way to Waitomo Caves. It was our first time caving so it was really interesting. They are full of water which mean that we went on tubes in full wet suits and floated through the whole cave system. The most interesting part was definitely the glow warms. Literally thousands of glow warms hang from the ceiling of the cave and glow bright, just like a glow stick, but smaller. It's actually their poo that glows, and it's because of the chemical reaction that creates the glowing poo that we have glow sticks and other toys today. Unfortunately as we were on the tubes and soaking wet we have no pictures of that, but i'm sure we'll remember it forever. From Waitomo we made our way down to Rotorua. There are a lot of springs and hot mud things randomly all over the town. The massive hot sinkholes can be 200 degrees celcius and are spotted all around the town and in a central park. We took in some more crazy Kiwi adventure sports such as Zorbing, which can only be done in Rotorua. You get in a inflated plastic ball with an inner ball suspended by bungee cords and roll down a hill. It's as fun as it sounds, it was so fun we had to go twice. We also went up the gondola and went street luging down, 5 times, definitely a wicked sport. After Rotorua we came to Lake Taupo which is also an adventure city by all means. We were signed up for a 15,000 foot skydive, higher than you can do anywhere in Canada. Unfortunately because of the clouds we had to postpone until a later day. Tommorow we are signed up to do a 8 hour, very challanging hike over the Tongariro Crossing. It is supposed to be one of the best one day hikes on the planet. We will go with two guides and will be equipped to the nine, as about 8 unprepared hikers die each year. On our way to Lake Taupo we couldn't resist a 50 foot freefall swing, it was only $10 and the tour bus was stopping there. There is fun around every corner in this country.

Huka Falls, on the way to Lake Taupo