Mud Pools, Hobbiton & Caving Adventures.

Our Route... Rotorua to Matamata to Waitomo

Like I said, we just had rice and beans, which we both dislike, but are learning to like. They also seemed like a reasonably healthy meal choice after eating noodles, oats, PBJ sandwiches, and canned chicken sandwiches most other days! We've also gotten incredible at cooking toast over a camping stove, it's more of art to us really.

That night we paid a Backpackers X-Base (hostel) in Rotorua to sleep in their parking lot and use showers, etc. Once you are in big cities in NZ, everything costs. For example, libraries have become our best friends because they [usually] allow free wifi and computer. In Rotorua, however, you've got to pay to use computers, internet, most wifi, and parking spots anywhere. This also meant no free camping within 50 km of the city. Hence paying a hostel to park there.

Mud Pools

The one thing we are missing out on with staying in our campervan is meeting more travellers like we would if we were staying in hostels and couchsurfing our way around NZ. So using this hostel was nice because we got to meet a really nice gal from Montreal! She had just finished law school but at her completion, was not convinced she could do that job for life, and so set off on a backpacking trip for a while to work here in NZ & travel around a bit. We're hoping she is able to find what she wants to do while she travels NZ by herself!

The next morning was odd. When you're in Winnipeg or Regina and you go to a park (Assinaboine or Wascana for example), you expect lots of paths, trees, open space, picnic tables... you know, park-ee stuff. But instead this park in Rotorua was filled with thermal mud and water pools all over! When you walked around, you saw steam coming up from out the ground and bushes everywhere you looked. It reminded me of that scary swamp forest in The Princess Bride... anyone remember the name? Fire Swamp maybe? It was so bizarre; and stinky. The whole rotten egg sulphur thing again. The little mud pools were bubbling over like a pot of thick paste boiling on your stove. Weirdest park ever.

It's a really big tree

California Redwood

                          Next we headed to the California Redwood Forest. Why there is a pocket of California Redwoods in this little area in NZ I have no idea. But they were massive! Not quite the width of the Kauri trees [actually nowhere near the width) but they were extremely tall. The largest ones in this forest are around 220 feet tall & 66.5 inches in diameter. The track we took through the forest was about an hour walk. This was also the place we first found out that our rain jackets are merely water resistant and not water proof. Thefe's a difference. Little travel tip, spend the extra money and get water proof stuff so that your clothes underneath don't get wet in the rain when you have nowhere to dry them...or a $2 poncho :)

Fake tree made for LOTR

Like Bilbo

We were then off to Matamata to see Hobbiton the following day! We stayed the night at another free site at a musuem parking lot just north of town. Ok it wasn't actually free, it was NZ$5 in an honesty box- which we did put money in, thanks to Milessa...

In Matamata later that night, we stopped in at a local cafe and had some very strong coffee and mango tea while the owner chatted with us and everyone else in the place. So many of the people are so friendly.

Like Gandalf

The next morning, we took the tour through Hobbiton, which was pretty cool. Milessa might have liked it more than me because the houses are just so stinking cute. The hobbit houses are all built to different sizes to make people appear bigger or smaller through the camera (Gandalf size or Hobbit size) which was neat to see. Also, guess where we met a guy from? Watson, Saskatchewan. That little town 2 hours north of Regina where Milessa sees a chiropractor. He's been working in Perth for a couple years and we just happened to meet him on this tour. Told you it was a small world. Watson has like 500 people.

After Hobbiton, we learned the importance of planning ahead- the ferry from north to south island had almost booked up until after the 20th of April, 4 days after we were planning. The only tickets available were double our planned price ($400 vs $200) or in the night when you could not see any of the scenery. Usually 2 weeks ahead is enough time but apparently a school break is starting at Easter which means ferrys book up earlier and costs go up. Costs being higher than what we anticipated seem to be a theme of NZ. Anyways, we got tickets on the 19th for $303 in the evening. Ouch. I definitely had my grumpy face on after that shananigan.

Before we got wet

Our campsite between Matamata and Waitomo that night allowed us a piece of home. Maybe my favourite joke will enlighten you. Me: Knock-knock... You: Who's there?... Me: Cowp... You: Cowpoo? Yep. Once we got our bed set up, the canopy out the back, nice and comfortable we got a nice big wiff of cow poo so we drove a little closer to the river.

On the way to Waitomo, we went through a small town called Cambridge, which happened to be where the royals, Kate & Will, were also heading through that day. That made for an extremely busy little town with many roads blocked off and the I-site closed. After much contemplating on whether or not we had time to wait for the royal drive by, we decided we had to get to Waitomo and not miss our tour in the caves as we plan on catching them in Wellington anyways.

Eel we touched

Going down... down... down

Hanging 100 feet up

One of the big things here in NZ is the Waitomo glowworm caves. It's one of the things that most people try to see in NZ. Our tour started at 3 pm and included a 100 foot abseil straight down into this wicked huge cave, tubing in an underground river, doing some caving, seeing glowworms, and climbing back up the cave wall to outside. It was an amazing experience. Apparently in Waitomo there is about 300 caves that have been surveyed, marked, and examined. But there's another 300-400 that no one has ever seen. So as you drive along in these hilly farmers fields there are entrances to caves all over the place, but you'd never know it because so many of them drop straight down in the ground. Kind of scary if you ever were wanting to roll down any hills! In all of these limestone tunnels are million of glowworms- which are actually just a specific type of maggot that hang in these tunnels. In the total darkness, it looks like green stars in the night sky and it's absolutely brilliant. There are also big cave spiders, eels, and Weta's(looks like a spider but with 6 legs). All pretty grosse, fyi. Anyways, check out the pictures because trying to explain it really won't do it justice. Milessa really overcame some serious fears here and I was so proud of her for doing all this crazy stuff with me!

Really small

We fit in really small spaces

1 km into the cave

Glowworms... or stars?

 

The cave we abseiled in from below

Our only way out