Afraid of water? Wear socks.





For anyone who remembered that we were in Tairua, it's the greatest town ever. It seemed like half of the people we saw walked around the whole town in barefeet. Kids, adults, grammas, people working at the markets, everyone. It's hilarious. Bana Goldsmith should move to this place. Anyways, after Tairua, we went to this hot water beach. It is warmed from underground and you hire a shovel and dig around in certain spots looking for the really hot water and sand to sit in. The beach like this in Ensenada, Mexico that Patty Kunkle took us to around new years was much better than this one... there was so many people here! Like to the point you could barely walk around because people were all crowding around the hot spots and finding hot water and digging little pools for themselves, wow it was hilarious. We then found a little free campsite on the beach in Bowentown after driving these incredibly windy roads in the mountains through the dark. That morning we got to see how beautiful it was really was at this free campsite. We hiked around this little hill down to an amazing beach that was bordered with massive amounts of volcanic rick which made for great climbing, for both Milessa and me. From there we went through Waihi, which is a town with a massive open pit gold mine right in the centre and was the original reason many people came to New Zealand. Other mining tunnels in the Karangahake Gorge were amazing as well. You wouldn't believe how dark and quiet it is 100 meters into a underground tunnel it is. The fact that people used to work in there for hours everyday is ridiculous, all to find some gold. Also, I swear that everything in Zelda is named after something in New Zealand. Karangahake Gorge? Kakarioke Gorge? Come on. Actually there's been way more Zelda appearances too, but this one was the most blatent, especially when you see how similar they kind of look. So because rock climbing and going into the tunnels in the gorge wasn't tiring enough, we decided that hiking a dormant volcano at Mount Manganui was a good idea. 200 meters tall, it was a about 30 minute hike up. However while we were climbing all of these stairs, locals were treating this as their training ground for marathons. This one old guy cruised up and down this thing like 3 times or something. Definitely the most fit town I've been to in a very long time. And I'm from Regina so you know that's saying something. The next free campsite, and every one we have found so far, are all thanks to a 15$ App we got on our iPhone. It's called Camping NZ by Rankers. For anyone traveling here, get it. It shows us all of the free campsites, paid for campsites, reviews, directions, free activities, and it works with no internet. Anyways, after that shout-out to Rankers, this next site was about 20 minutes off of the main highway into the mountains, at Kaiate Falls Scenic Reserve. You know how hard it can be to wash your hair without running water? Well I suppose we had running water, but it was about 75 meters belew in the waterfall basin. So we ran down there before it got dark, filled up our chillybin with 20 Liters of water and hiked back up (so as not to contaminate the water with soap). I haven't been that tired in a while. And I sloshed away half of the water to boot. This allowed us to clean our hair by laying the ground and washing eachothers hair. We're no hairdressers, but it sure felt good to have a little head massage and finally have clean hair. Whether we wanted them or not, we were both on track to have dreads in no time. The following morning allowed us the best possible wake-up ever. A hike down to the falls led us to a beautiful little basin with some cliff jumping! Which I managed to coax Milessa into in spite of her outrageous fear. Wearing her socks while jumping in seemed to make her feel better for some reason. It was a beautiful little swimming hole. This day brought us to Rotorua, a town which smells fairly bad due to the sulphur coming up from underground. But we decided a stench due to underground volcanic-like activity was cooler than the stink of hog-barns and refineries that we're used to! The fun really started here as I convinced Milessa to come white-water rafting with me! You'll see in the picture how terrified she was. We were in a raft with 2 german girls and 2 Italian guys and a couple different guides. They have the best job in the world. Trevor Friesen, this is your next job and probably career. This particular river apparantly has the highest commercially rafted falls at 7 meters. It was super fun. With our rafting tickets, we were given spa passes to the Polynesian spa here. But within 5 minutes, we realized spas aren't really our thing, especially when it's warm outside. We were overheating. You just sit and relax? 5 or 10 minutes was enough for me. And they stunk like sulphur. Which, for those of you who don't know smells a lot like rotten eggs. Dinner tonight was beans and rice. YUUUMMMMYYY! Tomorrow Lord willing (and it seems fairly often that our wills do not coincide!) we'll be off to see some thermal mud pools and the California Redwood Forest. See ya later! As a side note, but not too much on the side because these are big deals, congratulations to a few people close to us back home! Starlet Peterson is soon to be Starlet Krogsgaard as she is now engaged to Kresten! Congratulations to them! And if you didn't know before why we are coming home halfway through our RTW, now you can know it's for their wedding! And secondly, we just found out that our friend Aynsley just got engaged to her now fiance Bryan! Congratulations to them from NZ as well! We are so excited for both of you! Well, actually all 4 of you I suppose.