For a change we made it to our destination in daylight hours. That said, we didn't anticipate getting to Taupo to find that on public holidays, NZ has ridiculous laws on the sale of alcohol. No nights out here then...
Taupo is home to NZ largest lake which sits in the caldera of a volcano which began erupting hundreds of thousands of years ago. And still being a volcanically active area, we were in store for more geothermal activity like the pools. They say it rivals Rotorua in being the adrenaline capital of the north island. I know we had fun on the luge but I wouldn't go as far as calling that place an adrenaline capital. Fair enough.
To be honest, by this point I'd started to feel a little unwell and struggled to sleep. Hoping it was just a mild concussion and that it would pass, we carried on in search of activities to do in Taupo. Renowned for being an excellent skydiving spot, we held out a couple of days, the plan being to do our sky-dive on the last day. In the meantime we spent hours up at the bungee ledge watching lunatics throwing themselves of a 47 metre platform. Once bored of that, we headed 5 minutes up the road to the hot springs. And boy where they hot! Red raw skin everywhere you looked. However, I still wasn't feeling it. Tom booked his skydive for the afternoon we were due to leave and I was pretty distraught but I knew full well if I'd have gone up in that plane, it wouldn't have been pretty. The grin on his face as he came skipping back to the hanger made me want to slap him through sheer envy. He did great though. Managed to pay no attention to my pre-jump talk I gave him. "Tom, your harness looks loose. It's not uncommon for shoots to fail" etc. I failed to concentrate on the facts such as 30,000 jumps a year, no fatalities of late. His perforated eardrum however gave me lots of opportunities to play on the whole "bummers are deaf" line for the next week or so. What a bummer. It isn't a cheap affair. If you want the full works - video, photos etc, you pay for it. Literally paying for the camera man to jump too. But, like Tom always says, go big or go home. Although he tended to se that in those funny bars in NYC too so maybe I have my wires crossed...Very scenic place. You can see why they filmed Lord of the Rings here. So much space and diversity in the scenery. Now for the hideously long and painful drive to Wellington.