We were picked up at 8.30am and taken to the AquaTaxi office. We had to jump into the little speed boats and the tractor towed us down to the sea. Not cheap though at $34 (£17) each, one way!!
They are pretty fast boats actually, but it was really windy and choppy out at sea. It was sort of a mini tour as well as a drop-off taxi, so the guy took us to see Split Apple Rock first, which is apparently used in a lot of New Zealand Tourism adverts. Then we cruised up the coast. The scenery was absolutely stunning all the way up. We couldn't believe how nice it was. It was like being in the Caribbean or in Thailand. It's amazing how diverse this country is. It has everything in one. We pulled into a few bays for a closer look, then cruised up to sea lots of sealions on Tonga Island. There were quite a few of them swimming around or laid on rocks plus there were a couple of pups!

Then we were dropped on Tonga Beach, where me, Therese, Mel, Craig and Paolo started our 20km trek back to camp...we must be mad after doing the same only a couple of days ago! The beach was so nice and the sea is a lovely colour. It's really like being in a tropical paradise and we just didn't expect it at all.

So, the start time was 10.30am, and it started off with a steep walk through the forested hills. It was really sunny today so it was hot when we were in the sun. A lot of the time we were sheltered by the trees, but then every so often we'd get a break in trees giving us stunning views of the bays and coastline.

We stopped for lunch at 2pm at Torrent Bay. We'd all made some sandwiches this morning out of the stuff the driver had brought. Lovely spot to have lunch too, right on the beach. We only stopped for about 30 minutes before continuing our trek.

As the tide was out, we were able to walk across the lagoon saving us over an hour. It was a really vast area actually where the tide had gone out. There were still a few little streams that had formed, which we had to jump over though. Mel and Therese were hopeless at jumping them! They may as well have just walked through them.

The scenery on the walk was fantastic, but the final 3 and a half hours walking back were long! I think we prefer 4 hour walks.
We got back in good time, at 6pm. So that's another 7 and a half hours walk we've done. We were all so tired and our feet were killing. First thing was to jump in the shower. Useless showers though that trickled out half the time or blasted out cold water the rest of the time!

We had another BBQ tonight with homemade burgers and sausages with salad etc. Really good grub and it's been cheap too. Lisa arrived on a different bus today, so we sat around the camp fire again for a bit with her. We were all really tired though, so we didn't last long again.

Before bed we did stood and stared at the stars for 10 minutes. Because there's not much artificial light from street lights etc, you can see so much more on the sky. There were so many stars to see and they were really bright. I've only ever seen the sky as bright as that in Key Largo. We were all stood in amazement, until Therese ruined the moment and asked if anyone had any foot cream.

(I haven't had Internet properly for a while until now, so have had to post about 6 blogs today. Make sure you go back to Taupo and follow the blogs through!)