eNZed - day 9 (23-5-5)

It felt so good to have a hot shower and sleep in a dry bed with only one other person in it... I'm just going to stay in that moment for a sec... ahh!

OK! So First thing we did was check out the first hot spring area in the Lonely Planet.. Hell's Gate. They had a peacock patrolling the parking lot, looking for bribes. Dave got it..

I have to say the area was somewhat of a disappointment. No thick bubbling mud pools like we were hoping for, definitely no geysers (although they did have a little mud volcano)..

all they had were hot pools of gross looking stink-water.


And some sulfur crystals.. which Dave made sure to pilfer a few of..



At least Dave's spicing up the day! They had one thing that was really worth paying to get into this place and that was the hot waterfall.

I really wanted to sit in it, but I thought they'd probably get pretty upset, and then I'd be all wet again and we just dried off! But hey, it's a sunny day for the first time since the 20 minutes of sun on Day 3, so we'd better enjoy ourselves! We examined some bubbling mud postcards and decided that we should check out the Maori Arts and Crafts Institute tomorrow.

After Hell's Gate we went into Rotorua and had a nice lunch at a Thai restaurant. They had a funny spice scale that went: mild, kiwi medium, kiwi hot, thai medium, thai hot. We got a kick out of this and made sure to stay away from the "thai spicy" section of the menu.

After lunch we headed out to the Redwood Forest. Yup, redwoods.. imported straight from California in 1901.. or was it 1904... 100 years ago.. close enough.


We saw a weird pool of water that had no sediment or anything cloudingup the water. Everything sunk in it looked perfectly preserved. It had a strange smell to it.

There were also lots of little tiny mushrooms that I wanted to pinch, but I didn't want to kill them so I took some pics..


After the redwoods it was time to find us some hats. I just couldn't have that cold wet feeling that a hat would get rid of anymore. After some looking around, I finally found the perfect hat! It's so snuggly and warm =) complete with ear flaps and a big poof on the top. YAY! I could feel the warm staying in as soon as I put it on. I was all giggles and bouncing. A and Dave both found hats too, but they weren't as much fun as mine..

Then it's dinner and off to sleep at the park.

To see all the pics from Day 9, click here!