Hello from Gisborne! Much has happened since our last post, so I’m going to fill in the blanks, starting with our time in Rotorua.
If you read Hannah’s last post, you’ll know that we had a bit of a torrid couple of days to begin our stay in Rotorua, as we found out Hannah had pneumonia. We therefore abandoned our holiday park after the first night and checked into a motel for Christmas Eve and Christmas night. As much as I didn’t like to see Hannah Ill, I certainly wasn’t complaining about a couple nights of semi luxury!
It was just a couple of nights though as we resumed our adventure in the campervan on Boxing Day, with Hannah’s antibiotics starting to kick in.
Rotorua in general is a very activity based place; i.e. you wouldn’t really go there to relax (although there are plenty of natural hot pool places where you can do just that) – you would typically go there to do something different or adventurous. It’s also where the New Zealand Maori culture is most celebrated, with several Maori culture villages available for tourists to experience.
One of the reasons Rotorua is such a unique place though is the geothermal activity that is evident throughout, even right in the city centre as you see steam rising from grates and such. It’s really quite surreal to see! There’s also a small park (the name escapes me now) right in the midst of urban Rotorua that is packed with very hot, steaming pools and bubbling mud pools.
If you head a little further out of the city, you’ll see even more of this kind of activity. We went to Wai-o-tapu Thermal Wonderland, about 20 minutes south of Rotorua itself, which is quite a large park absolutely filled with steaming craters, bubbling mud baths and colourful, steaming lakes.
It’s also home to one of Rotorua’s most iconic hot pools; Champagne Pool, a blue lake with a surreal orange edge that bubbles and omits an endless stream of steam. It really is quite an impressive sight.
The park is definitely worth a visit and I’m glad we went, but at $35 per adult, I felt it was a bit steep for what is essentially a walk around some natural wonders that took us under an hour to complete. I mean it’s not like they’re providing a service that justifies the price… it would all still be there exactly as is if there wasn’t an entrance and a ticket desk!
Anyway… from there we drove back into Rotorua and on to the first taste of adventure in the form of Zorb! Rotorua is the birthplace of zorbing (you’ve no doubt seen the big padded ball shown below) which is now a worldwide industry… so I thought I may as well give it a bash! They basically stick you in the big rubber ball and then throw you down a hill. You can either go down flailing in a ball half full with water or you can go down strapped in and dry. I chose the latter, simply because I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of wet clothes!
Anyway, it was fun but very short lived! Not an overly amazing rush of adrenaline by any stretch of the imagination, but it was worth doing. I’m guessing the wet ride would probably be more fun! Hannah watched on from the sidelines, still recovering but probably not her type of activity anyway!
From there it was on to the skyline – nothing too exciting, just cable carts to the top of the hilly landscape that overlooks the lake and the city. Again, definitely worth the ride up just to soak in the views. There is also the ‘luge’ at the top which is a go-cart type track which seemed to go either all or most of the way back down with a ski-lift bringing people back up! It looked pretty awesome but they have the same thing in Queenstown so I’ll make sure I get in on that then.
Finally, our holiday park (Rotorua Thermal Holiday Park) that we ended up staying at for 2 of the 4 nights can best be described as… just OK. The major let down for us was the lack of hot showers – especially given Hannah’s condition! The only real use we got out of the facilities was the amount of washing we managed to get done… but even that required extra dollar so we were just left wondering what we actually got for our money. But I guess we were never going to like everywhere we stay!
Next up was Mount Maunganui, which was amazing and played host to a rather special moment! Watch out for the next post…