Rotorua

Rotorua

Tuesday 13/11/12 - Sunday 18/11/12

We stayed in the comfortable Sunkist hostel in Thames just for the one night.It's quite a nice little town by the water. I was at the local supermarket by 8:30am getting breakfast and the clientele were interesting to say the least. New Zealand's version of Asda in Farnbrorough I suppose. There were some goldmines that you could visit, but that didn't really appeal, so we packed up and drove to Cormandel. It was a 'Must see' place from a friend of mine, but we didn't really find anything of any real interest there apart from it being a pretty little beach town. Are we becoming spoiled? But even the tourist information point was full of leaflets for other areas, so we kept heading around the cape.
We reached Whitianga which is a jumping point to 'Hot Water Beach' and 'Cathedral cove'. Unfortunately, the weather was turning a bit sour and soon rain was hitting the windscreen again. We grabbed a coffee and probably stayed for the best part of an hour deciding what to do. After all, you would prefer beach weather for a day at the beach. Eventually we decided to keep going with our travels and return here when the weather was a bit nicer. There was also that fact that our next stops; Rotorua & Taupo had been top of our list when we were planning this trip in the UK and we could feel excitement for this building. Decision made.
We made a reservation at Crash Palace Backpackers and set-off. We drove 342km that day and after that I promised myself that we would make shorter hops in future. It was a bit too much time behind the wheel for my liking.

Arriving in Rotorua, we initially though that we were driving past a water treatment plant. The smell was horrendous. As we kept getting closer and closer to the town, the smell continued and we thought that the farmers must be muck spreading. It was only hours later that we realised that the smell was caused by the thermal activity and all the sulphur in the air was to blame...and it wasn't going away.
We eventually arrived in the Crash Palace at dusk and checked in. The reception area was nice, but the room was pretty depressing. The walls were painted dark grey and there was a small window with bars over it. And of course, that window had been open and the room was smelling of sulphur too. We were thinking about cutting our stay short, but it was one of the highest rated hostels in town and everything seemed to be fully booked now anyway. "It will do", we concluded.

The town was an odd little place really. It was so quiet everywhere we went. I lost count of the amount of bars we walked past with NOBODY in them. Just a really bored looking barman, reading the paper.

We ventured into 'The Pheasant Plucker' which was one of the busier looking bars [4 patrons] and bought a couple of drinks from two native barstaff that had clearly never done this before. They had one type of beer. "I guess I'll have a pint of that then, please". We played some pool and listened to a local band 'Swamp thing' that were surprisingly good. We spent most of the evening laughing about how bizarre the place was.

We spent some time at Rainbow Springs [a zoo of sorts] as Mari was desperate to see a Kiwi bird [no photos allowed].

We did a tour of some of the thermal spots to get a bit closer to the source of the bad smells.

An excellent couple of hours mountain bike riding in the redwoods. The trails were great. Intricate and flowing with well groomed berms and table tops. I gave my rented hardtail a bit of a hard time. We barely scratched the surface of the trails available. I think if I lived in this area, I would be here several times a week. It was great fun.

We had a slap-up curry one evening and duvet day when the weather was bad.

Our geography was a little out and some of the things we were excited to do were much closer to Taupo than Rotorua, so it made sense to wait until we got further along.