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Today we left the National Park and made our way back north towards Rotorua.
Rotorua is famous for it's natural hot springs, mud pools, cooking pools and geysers. We also think it may be famous for the smell too as there was an awful smell of sulpher in the air…think it's something to do with the acid and heat in the ground…phewwwww!
So that we could see it all we went to the largest Maori heritage center called Te Puia. We spent all day there looking at the bubbling hot mud pools that looked like clay…we sooo wanted to jump in, it looked lovely and we bet it was good for the skin lol.
The largest geyser there was called the Three Feathers Geyser after the Prince of Wales had visited and said that it looked like our Welsh 3 feathers, it was crazy the ground is so hot that the rain water gathers in a hole in the ground and it heats it up until it gets to such a high temperature that it explodes and shoots water up to 15 meters into the air, this one in particular shot the water in three directions just like the 3 feathers.
It also had a reconstruction of a Maori village complete with town house, meeting house, food storage and how they lived in a village. It was fabulous to see how they lived and how so simple things were for them; they used the hot spring (cooking pools) to boil up their fish for food and smoked them over the fire. After a look around and a play about in the village, we went to watch a true Maori show where we really enjoyed the dancing and singing…wow how strong and passionate they are in singing and dance…after this we laughed at considering becoming part of a Maori Cult…. thinking Donzy has the arms & Lucy sure has the legs!!
That evening we went into the town for a little look around and decided that we would play the Lotto and try our luck……… we were then amazed at the following day…….. When we went into the supermarket and scanned the ticket to see if we had won that it said
" Congratulations you have Won!!"
We thought this was brilliant and it must have been beginners luck as we're both not usually lucky in the winning department lol…. but still we had won $23 so we treated ourselves to something sweet in the supermarket for tea! Whoop whoop!
After Rotorua we headed further north to Bay of Islands and by the time we had arrived there it was dark and hammering down with rain so we quickly found a camp spot and settled down for the night… (Or so we thought) after getting into bed and reading for an hour we both decided that we were not happy with where we were and itchy feet so we made the decision to just move on…. it's so easy to do this with a campervan, it's a major perk!So late at night we decided to move on to a different part of the Bay of Islands and found a lovely spot in a small upper class town that was full of top class hotels and water sports…lovely!
The next day as we woke the rain had still not eased so we traveled back down south into Auckland.
We stayed just outside of Auckland in Orwera as it's such a huge busy city it's really hard to park our camper anywhere. We found especially one day when we wanted to go into the city for a look around and some lunch that we were really careful to park and ended up parking over half hour down the road as the city did not accommodate for us to park the camper as it's way too big for any spaces and too high for any of the car parks, so we parked way out and found upon return a ticket stuck to the front windscreen. A parking ticket for $40 for ' parking the wrong way on a two way road'….uuhhh….we thought so we rang to ask and they said it's a law here to park the same side of the road that your facing! Well we laugh about it now and expect you all will too!
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