I arrived in Rotorua yesterday, and have seen the lake that looks like this picture. Rotorua is a bit of a geothermal hotspot and the whole town smells like rotten eggs but it's not that bad. At the weekend I was in the Bay of Islands and I visited the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, where the Maoris and the British signed a treaty and New Zealand became it's own country, or something like that. I also went on a trip up to the top of the country - to Cape Reinga - to see the Tasman Sea bump into the Pacific Ocean, and I went dune boarding down a rediculously high sand dune and helped dig for shellfish on Ninety Mile Beach. The sun came out for us and it was a lovely day. We had a tour guide of Maori descent who told us loads of stories - it was difficult to take them all it. The next day I went on a boat cruise around the Bay and we saw dolphins playing in the wake of the boat, which was wonderful.

The day after that I caught the Magic bus back to Auckland and it rained all day. We spent most of the day in the bus so it didn't matter too much, but I couldn't see out of the window that much. We went to see The Tree that Maoris believe separated Mother Earth from Father Sky, and it's blinking enormous. I have never seen such a fat tree, and it's over 2000 years old. Yesterday I left Auckland on the bus and travelled to Rotorua, via Waitomo, which has an amazing underground cave system and is home to lots and lots of glowworms. I went black water rafting, which is not nearly as scary as it sounds as you just wade through the water in complete darkness, using the cave walls to guide you, with an inner tube around your waist, looking at glowworms. After a while it got really deep and our guide got us to put our legs on the tube of the person in front of us and form the strangest conga line ever, still in pitch blackness. It was great fun :) I have three nights in Rotorua (because of the bus timetable) and am chilling out for a while - I went to a spa with two people who are on my bus and we just sat around in thermal spa pools all morning, and we're off to look at Lake Rotorua later with all the steam and the smells. Tomorrow we're going to do some adventure sports things, but I'm not sure what yet - there's too much choice!