So while all of you at home are dying of heat exposure, the mercury is dropping here in NZ, and there is talk of snow hitting Auckland and Wellington tonight. I don’t know if that will actually happen, and if it does it will be but a dusting. It’s around 3°C here now at 9:20pm. I am not going outside – I have no reason to, and besides I need to keep all of you super interested people updated on my life here in this chilled landscape. Also, I’ve realized that this post is all over the place in terms of detail, so just stick with my uneven application of explanation.
This weekend saw me visiting new and interesting lands. Again. Rewind to the first day I got here. I met the rest of the American girls here, one of who had found a deal on GrabOne (like a kiwi Groupon or LivingSocial, emails about super cool discounts for some of the most random things) for zorbing in Rotorua. It was decided that this was going to be a great opportunity to take advantage of – I still didn’t know what was going on, but it sounded fun. As Alex didn’t have enough money in her account and the deal was about to expire, I paid for it with my card. Then a few days later I reconsidered this situation and realized that everyone works during the week and I work on the weekends, and we wouldn’t really ever have a chance to go together. So I was going to sell my ticket to someone else – not an issue – someone else would want to go, and the deal was only for 3 tickets max. Anyways, it was really unclear as to who was going to buy the ticket(s) from me, and there was some discussion about selling one of the tickets when the others went to Rotorua. Fast forward to 5 days ago when I was looking into Rotorua, its Māori heritage, and Alex told me there was a rockwall in the hostel they were staying in. I decided to go to Rotorua for the weekend, and ask Jaqui if it were all right for me not to come in this weekend and perhaps edit photos during the week. She said that was fine, and so things were set, I just had to book a bus and a place to sleep.
So, just 36 hours after setting foot in Wellington off the ferry from the south island, I was on my way to the railway station to catch a bus to Rotorua. I was pleasantly surprised with the comfort of the InterCity bus both on the south island and yesterday. It’s just a coach bus really, without a bathroom in the back, but I have been fortunate enough to land on buses that were sparsely populated, letting me put my stuff in the aisle seat and myself by the window. I had dutifully brought along Moby Dick and some copies of books from the library, but the window presented far more interesting stories and thought trains to ride. I love staring out the window and spacing out. For the most part I couldn’t even be bothered to fish out a pen and notebook to take down my surprisingly lucid ideas. And so they have fluttered into grey matter in my head leaving but fleeting imprints. Bleh. Something to do with things to write, people to email, how to email them, what to say, and advisors. Some things like those.
New Zealand is beautiful. It really doesn’t matter where you are it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful in the rain and sun and clouds and warm and cold. We bused past a volcano covered in snow, and the largest lake in NZ, as well as the second largest national park in the world. I have loads of photos to upload, and perhaps that will happen at the same time as this post – probably tomorrow when I get down to faster/stronger Internet. Just going on this bus ride was amazing, actually getting to Rotorua was kind of extra in a way. I was glued to the window when we passed Te Paia and some tiki poles close to the center city.
We did make it there finally after many hours on the bus – about 7. After an adventure on a city bus in which Nikki Alex and I tried to get off the bus 3 times, twice in totally wrong places, we got to the zorbing place. The bus driver thought we were hilarious.
Little did I know that our tickets were for ‘zydro’ otherwise known as, you will get soaking wet while tumbling down a hill in a giant plastic hamster wheel. Ha. That was funny. Not. I only brought one pair of clothes for the weekend and a change of underwear. I have to say I seriously considered asking just how much clothing one needed to go hydrozorbing. Oh, it was raining too. Sweet. So long story short, we were brought up to the top of a hill, told to take a running dive into a zorb, then the ball was filled with (thankfully) warm water. The guy filling it looked at me rolling up my pants kind of laughed and said there was no way I was staying dry during this process. I had more or less resigned myself to this already. Finally it was all set, water up to mid shin, and I was zipped into this ball and told to press against one side to get my zig zagging path started. Yeah. Soon soaked rumbling down a hill in this plastic ball. It was fun, though I do wish I had been a little bit more prepared for the whole wet bit, and actually brought another article of clothing. I was quite damp for the rest of the day, which made my legs go a little numb when we were walking back from dinner. Oh well. I had a bowl full of crispy mushrooms for dinner. They were pretty good.
This morning we got up, checked out, and went to a little park with thermal pools. Rotorua is known for it’s thermal pools and hot springs – you can get a lot of spa treatments around there that are supposed to be super beneficial. As we were driving into the area there were random giant plumes of steam coming from the ground on the side of the road. This park had little groups of vegetation with steam coming up, and you could see the water boiling. Check out the pictures – there was one little rock in a depression on the path and the water was happily bubbling away. Oh, and there were pukekos everywhere in this little park. There are many pictures of them. They are so lovingly awkward and awesome. They are birds by the way, that are brilliantly blue and orange, incase you were having a hard time identifying them in the pictures. This park area looked like it was out of Jurassic park, and reminded me of my trip to the Oregonian rainforest at the end of May. Everything was so brilliantly green and full of ferns.
Pretty soon it was time for my bus to leave (Nikki and Alex had booked a slightly later bus that was full by the time I tried to book it) and so I dutifully stood in front of the iSite (tourist center thing…. like an information station) to wait for the bus. It came a bit late, and we were on our way to Taupō, at which point I switched buses, this time to a double decker one. It was pretty cool.
So now I am back in Wellington, my travelling adventures over for the moment. I should explain more of what I did. Sorry about that, it’s not happening right now.
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