Rotorua!

Wow, that was a pretty incredible first day of this trip. Currently I'm at a backpackers hostel and they have a cheap internet connection. I am not doing much tonight so I thought I would share my experience today. I'd rather be taking a shower right now but my towel is still soaked from when I went zorbing. And sorry guys, I can't do pictures because there's no SD slot on this computer.

My day when something like this:

• Got up
• Went Zorbing
• Whoa!
• No really, whoa. Zorbing is exactly what it sounds like in the way that you cannot even begin to understand. 
• You roll down a hill in a giant ball. And there's water in the ball.
• Then we took the gondola up a mountain.
• From up on the hill we went luging. I thought it was going to be like the Olympic Luge where you are lying down, but instead these were kind of like go-karts with no engines. They went down the mountain on trails of varying steepness and sharpness of turns.
• When you saw a sign that said SLOW in big red letters, then you'd better slow down. You would most definitely flip over if you do not.
• At the bottom of the luge runs there was a chairlift that would take you back to the top. For a moment I wondered if this place was a skiing area in winter, but then I remembered-- it is winter.

Ok, those bullet points are getting a bit ridiculous now. After luging we took the gondola back down the mountain. We were originally going to go on a short hike in the afternoon, but once we got to the bottom we decided to go through the Rainbow Springs Kiwi Wildlife Park. I got to see a real live Tui, Kea, and Kiwi. Kiwi's are bigger and flightless-er* than I had thought.

To get back to town and our hostel we decided to walk instead of take the bus. Rotorua is known for it's geysers, hotpools, bubbling pools of muck, and its smell. On the way back we took a detour through a park full of foul-smelling, bubbling muck. That was pretty neat, and once the smell was overpowering it brought back memories of Yellow Stone I didn't even know I still had. As we were leaving the park, we saw an incredible rainbow in the sky. Five minutes later, it was even better defined, and you could start to see a second rainbow. In another five minutes we could see the the whole rainbow AND the whole second rainbow. Normally I'm not too big on rainbows, but this is probably the best rainbow I've ever seen. It was kind of like this. No joke.

So for the first day of my spring break adventure (not counting the first day of travel), this was pretty awesome. We'll try and spend less money in the days to come though... which wont be as hard because we are hiking tomorrow. And then we get to the Coromandel peninsula the following day, so from there we will be doing stuff like hiking on the beach.

I better get off now because the computer is about to kick me off. Greetings from the beautiful, foul-smelling city of Rotorua everyone.


*I always knew that kiwis were flightless, but in reality they are more like a two legged mammals than a flightless bird. They ware about the size of a large US possum or midsized raccoon.