January 6th, Rotorua to Waitomo

After a mud bath you need to do something really fun to wake you up?! As we travelled west toward Waitomo we made a little detour to Lake Taupo and Huka falls. The entire 100 mile journey was lovely as we travelled the thermal explorer highway southwest towards Taupo and Waitomo. Temperature was in the mid 70’s today, and should be about 80 degrees tomorrow. We wanted to check out an area called Huka falls. Little did we know they do jet boat rides up the river to Huka falls? This was another nice NZ thrill that certainly shook us out of our zombie like mud bath trance. The Huka jet boats have 580hp of engine to deliver all the thrills and spills necessary to jolt one into attention. Zipping in and out of limbs and brush, slicing past rock walls, enjoying plentiful 360’s and skirting the outflow of Huka falls was the course of action. After our fun on the river we enjoyed a picnic above the falls and headed out in “RT” towards Waitomo. RT is the name of our travelling van that we call home for the next couple months. The kids named it RT. The adults define RT as Rolling Turtle. The kids define RT as something different. Well, we did say they could name it. We are really looking forward to our stay in Waitomo. There we will take in a two cave combo tour on January 7th, the Waitomo Glowworm Cave and Ruakuri Cave. Ok gotta go, we are going to see bunny shearing today, and then caves later this afternoon. Bunny shearing??

Itinerary - we are travelling the North Island at the moment. We are basically in the central part of the North Island on the western side. We are still only about 3 hours south of Auckland. We will continue to travel the North Island until January 13th. At that time we will ferry 3 hours across the ocean to the South Island.