The next day we drove to the town of Waitomo, which is famous for its caves and glow worms. We did a little tour here, called 'Black Water Rafting'. This was cool, I really enjoyed it. You get a wetsuit, wellies & a hard hat with a headlamp, and down ye go. The best part for me was that the guide sensed my eagerness (the girls werent too keen on this when it came to it) and let me go first for most of the day. We spent quite a few hours climbing through  the caves with just the little headlamp, sometimes crawling through tiny tunnels (where we turned off the lamps so it was pitch dark),  sometimes swimming through the water, other times floating on inflatable tubes. There was a few times when I was ahead of the group, by myself in the dark, I started to wish I hadnt seen that Exorcist Prequel a few months ago. If you've seen it, you'll know why.

 

Next, we went to Rotorua, a geothermal area that smells of rotten eggs. This town has steam pouring out the drains, and geyser pools that are 210C. This was an interesting evening, a Maori guide took us around the town, giving us the history of his people. Then we went to their house, had dinner, and they taught us lads how to do the 'Hakkha' (what the NZ All Blacks do before a game). this was emabarrassing, cos they made us take off our tops and do it in front of all the girls from the tour. I dont have any pictures of this.

At the end of the evening, one of the Maori guys put on a crash helmet & drove the bus back to our hostel. On any other day, that would've seemed strange.