NZ - North Island

We've been in New Zealand for about ten days, doing a speed tour around the North Island, and now we're in the South. It's been incredible so far, the landscape is absolutely amazing, as impressive as Canada and more beautiful in some places. It's quite cold, sort of fleeces and gloves cold, though the South is much much colder than the North – they've had snow around Christtchurch recently whereas around Auckland we were in t-shirts (though only in full sun at midday!)
I've done some totally amazing things so far (by the way, this bit is going to be full of 'amazings,' 'awesomes' 'incredibles' and 'unbelievables' – I can't help it, they infect you with their enthusiam), things that would never have occurred to me before NZ!

We picked up a motorhome from Auckland to drive round the island, because the only way to see it properly is to have your own wheels and the campervan industry is HUGE here. Every third car is a motorhome of some kind. We drove to Waitomo first, to see the cave system, which is incredible (I should fine myslf for those). The rock formations are amazing (damn) and the caves are so big, the ceilings are 30–60m high in some places and some go on for kilometres. We did a walk through the glow-worm caves, where hundreds and thousands of glow-worms live on the ceilings, and you take a boatride down the underground river to see them in the dark, which was really cool. Then we did a walk around a cave with unbelievable (bugger) rock formations, also huge bugs called wetas which look like giant revolting grasshoppers. Yuck.

Having not had enough dark, watery and cold subterranean adventures, we decided to go cave tubing the next day, aka riding down freezing underground rapids in the dark on a rubber ring with a bunch of other lunatics. Lots of sexy wetsuit gear was required, but I have never been so cold!!! We all lost my hands a feet after about twenty minutes, but our guides informed us all that they were 'specially trained not to care,' unless it was hyothermia, so we didn't tell them. It was a bit sary at first, because the cave tunnel was very low and quite narrow, also you only had a little head torch and you were 60m underground for 2 hours (plus the rapids were whirling around your waist, when they weren't too deep and you were floating on the ring chilling your bum). We also had to jump (backwards, I still don't know why) down a couple of waterfalls (only a few metres high, but with really sharp rocks at the bottom that you just had to 'miss') and then there was the amusing lights-off portion of the trip where we floated down this river in the pitch dark. At which point one of ourr guides thought it would be hilarious to grab my inflatable ring and pretend to chuck me out of it. A short sentence and some frightened silence later he asked me if I was 'always this angry.' Apparently smiling was a prerequisite of the tour too.

After Waitomo I forced John to go to Rotorua, land of the hot springs (yes, that means sulphur bubbling out of the ground and it smells horrendous). My enthusiam for soaking in mud pools and mineral water was slightly dampened by the scummy, smelly, dirty, muddy pools we found. I don't know what I expected – maybe crystal pools with healing properties where nymphs (the Narnia kind) frolic and soothing facial masks appear in neat rock basins. It was not that, but it was incredibly cool – we went to a 'thermal wonderland' which was a park of several square kilometres where they had springs and pools of different colour because of the minerals – the orange and turquoise one was bizarre and really striking, but they were red, yellow, green, blue....(you get the picture). Also the rotten egg stench was pretty overpowering, and when we bought some fish and chips in Lake Taupo, plentiful in thermal waters, the fish tasted like old foot.

The longest river in NZ flows into Lake Taupo, however, and on that river they have....jetboats!! I had never heard of these before but basically it's ike a jetski but a boat, and they do stupid speeds and go up and down rivers – and we found a company that actually went up and down the rapids! Basically about eight of you just get in and hold on while they roar up and down the river, doing 360s and jumps over the rapids. They also make a point of going as close to trees, rocks et as they possibly can, and john laughed at me when I had to close my eyes at some points! I love fast boats, and that was really great fun – I'd do it again anytime!