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I was welcomed onto the bus this morning by a grumpy man who told me I was late. He was correct, but blunt. This is GP, Grumpy Pete, my driver for the next few days. He is so dry he makes the Sahara Desert look positively drenched.
On the way to Rotorua we stopped at a gold mining valley to walk over some rickety bridges and take photos. The place was left for dead once the gold ran out.
Let's start with an obvious fact: Roturoa stinks of rotten eggs. It has a million and one steaming holes (and I'm not talking about the people) and most of those contain water so sulphuric it's like battery acid. I stopped off with a bloke called Robbie at Te Puia to see the giant geysers and mudpools and my camera battery inevitably died. The place looks like an alien world and we didn't get to see it all due to a c*** up in our timings.
Actually, this was an eventful afternoon. I went off to the local Maori village for a traditional hangi (maori feast cooked in a pit) and entertainment. It was a fun evening and I loaded up on the buffet meal, which was bloody gorgeous. The bus driver who took us there was hilarious. Afterwards I joined some of the girls back at Base for a quiz night, which involved me wrapping someone in toilet paper, and which we won! The prize was a free night's accommodation at Base plus a hundred dollar bar tab. That we had to finish on the night. I just about found room in my stomach for a lucky dip of shots and had to get some sleep. I arrived in my room just in time to witness the arrest of a group of people out in the park, and one bloke getting away.
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