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A nice 7:30am bus awaited us when we left Hot Water beach and like when we left Auckland we had a couple of planned stop off's on the way to our next over night stop, our first was Karangahake Scenic Reserve.
Here we went on a 40 minute walk through the scenic gorge, following a track which crossed over a river on swing bridges and through a dark, railway tunnel (obviously not still in use). It was nice to stretch the legs and a nice bit of scenery before we boarded the bus for some more travelling.
The next brief stop was in Paeroa, where they make the soft drink 'L&P' (Lemon & Paeroa) which is "world famous in New Zealand." It is only a very small town with nothing worth writing home about, we went to the supermarket and that was about it. We only really stopped here as the bus needed to refuel and by law it can not have passangers on it when doing this. So again we stretched our legs for about 45 minutes before getting back on the bus to complete our journey through to Waitomo.
Before we arrived in Waitomo our bus driver did warn us that it was a very very small town, blink and you will miss it, small. He wasn't lying. The town of Waitomo consisted of a shop, a pub and a hostel, that is all! However the hostel had beautiful surroundings and was very quiet. When we checked in we were given a private room for the same price as the dorms so that was a bonus. The hostel was surrounded by country side and almost took the feel of a ski resort.
One of....no, the only reason the Kiwi Bus stops in Waitomo is because of the Waitomo caves and the glow worms which live in these caves. One of the activities you can do in Waitomo is a combo of climbing, zip lining, 'tubing' (no buckets involved like Laos, just sitting in a rubber ring) and absailing, all of which sounded very fun. However it was expensive and not something either of us knew about before arriving, with this in mind we decided against it and saved our money for other activities we want to do later on in the trip.
Therefore a people went off to cave etc. we had a whole afternoon of doing nothing, this was fine by us though as the location was great and really chilled out. It was a shame however that we spent a chunk of it trying to work out a time frame for our Kiwi Experience trip, spreading it out over the two months we have got. This didn't go to plan as we wanted to stay longer in Waitomo (only an extra night) but couldn't as the next bus was fully booked and therefore we were restricted to just the one night. It turns out that the "legendary hop - on, hop - off bus" was alot easier to hop - off and not so easy to hop back on again.
Between this, eating and getting a internet card stuck in one of the pay phones (it was a delicate operation to retrieve it, which involved two sets of tweezers) evening was upon us and we joined the majority of the bus in the pub to watch the England v France quarter final. As most of you will probably know England lost, bad times, but the beer tasted good so it wasn't a complete waste of an evening.
So once again we only had one night at the over night stop off, regardless of wanting to stay longer. There was nothing we could do though so it was another early morning bus and onwards to our next destination.
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