Todd and Lisa's RTW trip

We have been so excited about telling you all our extreme adventures… we realized we are leaving lots of other things out.  When we left HWB we headed south to a town called Rotorua. It is a really active hot spot of NZ.  Everything is smoking and bubbling all around… hot springs up the wazzu.  The whole town stunk like rotten eggs from all the sulphur. It’s strange how fast we adjusted to it. While we were there we went to a park there that had all sorts of cool volcanic stuff.  we attached some pics. There was the largest hot spring there, frying pan lake, but unfourtunately WAY to hot to get into!!

From there we headed down to Taupo. (where we sky dived).  In order to save $$ we have been camping… ok really sleeping in the back of the station wagon….. In Taupo, we found a beautiful free camp spot right along the side of an emerald green river.  A little ways up the river there was a natural hot stream that poured over into the cold river… it was the best morning shower we have ever taken (except you can’t get your face wet because of meningitis). We have set up the back of our station wagon pretty good.. although we still feel kinda like bums….  We have to leave the trunk open so that our feet hang out!

To answer mama J’s ???’s about sky diving we were actually pretty calm on the way up there.  We had talked to a few people who had just done it and they were all saying how scary it is but once you do it its awesome.  So we had the mentality.. we are doing it so JUST DO IT.  now don’t get us wrong we were definatly nervous as we sat in the little airplane looking out the window going higher and higher… and then when they popped open the door it was like ” you want me to do WHAT”.  But the truth is that as soon as you scoot up to the hatch, the wind kinda just sucks you out and you are just falling and it is SO F-IN COOL, and the view is beautiful (at least what we remember, and our dvd shows us) and the rush is out of this world.  Apparently we free falled for about 45 sec, 7,000 feet, 120 mph.  It felt more like sometime between not long enough and eternity. at 5000feet they pop open the parachute and then you float down chilling out taking in how crazy you are.  Our guides were feeling good and did some tricks for us.  When we landed we slid in, our hearts were pounding and the smiles on our face were painfully big!! We got a great DVD, where you all can see for yourselves!

We moved on west to a town called Waitomo.  Waitomo is known for its caves.  The caves are full of some species of worms (actually larva) that glow…. We took a really cool trip down into the caves.  Abseiling, rock climbing tubing in the dark etc…

Our internet card is almost up… check the pics we’ll write more soon.

These are Rotorua (frying pan lake)

This h2o is actually 200 degrees…They call it Inferno Lake

Bubbling Mud… cool huh??

This is our morning shower..

Our caving adventure!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.