Auckland to Rotorua

October 24 & 25 2005
After getting back to Auckland (no hang ups with the car or with our driving and we only got stuck in one traffic jam!), we had a relaxing evening back in Michael and Ardith's apartment. We decided to go ahead and splurge on a nice lunch and view up in the Skytower. It's just like Seattle's space needle with the rotating restaurant and you get free admission to the observatory deck if you have a meal up there. It was a beautiful day for it and the views were great. One of the attractions of the skytower is the "Sky Jump", which to us implied some freefalling activity. But when we got closer and saw people doing it, it was more of a controlled belay from the top of the tower. A rush I'm sure to be outside and up that high, but a little false advertising maybe? Not a lot of "jumping" involved, but I suppose "Sky Controlled Fall" isn't as dramatic sounding.

After lunch we hopped on our first bus and four hours later arrived in Rotorua, the thermal, tourist capital of the North Island. Holy tourist brochures....batman! (only a few of you will appreciate that comment). Anyway, here is where you can do just about anything as long as you're willing to pay money. Lots of "adventure" activities here: Zorbing, bungy jumping, riding in fast boats, simulated sky diving, luging after a gondola ride. As well as more family friendly tourist activities like sheep shearing shows, farms shows, feed the sheep, pet the sheep, see an ostrich, walk through a conservation stream/forest with headphones on as your tour guide, and oh yeah, those thermal things I was talking about. I'm not trying to sound cynical, we've just become a little overwhelmed at the commercialism and the cost of it all. We're trying to find the "best" of it all without being too cheap. It's also hard now, because we don't have a car, and public transport is minimal so we are at the mercy of the timetables and prices of the more specialized shuttles. Ah well, it's still cheaper than paying $6 a gallon for gas if we were to rent a car!

So this morning (Oct 25) we finally made our way out to the famous Agrodome which holds sheep shows and all those adventure activities and walked around a bit, debating about the sheep show - I really wanted to see the dogs, and low and behold the show that was in progress moved outside and did the dog show part right in front of us (without us having to pay...I know, we're awful), but I saw the part I wanted to and we were fine leaving and not seeing the whole show. So we're back downtown now, catching up on internet stuff, and will head out to do a small hike this afternoon, and tomorrow we'll go check out all this thermal activity.

We're staying at our first hostel here. It's a nice one with full ammenities (everything shared), including its own thermal pool. We splurged on a double room (aka privacy) and quickly got over the shock of the size of it (not much bigger than the bed), realizing we're here to see stuff and meet people not hole ourselves up in our room.
More to come....