Lake Taupo

We left Mick in Wellington and continued our journey northwards to Lake Taupo. The journey across to the main highway from the hostel was crazy - the road was kept on going up and up and was really really windy, but we made it in one piece eventually to Taupo. The lake itself is the biggest lake in NZ, you can only just see the other side, but has almost waves like the sea. We arrived there pretty late so just parked up and fell asleep. The next day we went on a walk that starts at a hot spring. As it Taupo is a geothermal area there was a naturally heated stream that cascaded in to a cold water lake. The water was lovely, it was so warm I could have stayed there all day. Elliott swam in to the freezing cold stream first, but there was no way I was doing that. Eventually we left and walked downstream to the Huka Falls - a famous waterfall in the area. The falls didn't start from a great height, but the amount of water churning around, the res no way anyone could get anywhere near them. After a quick ice cream we headed back to the car and had the usual lunch of peanut butter sandwiches.

We passed Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings on our way up to Taupo:

After a quick stop, we headed to the 'craters of the moon' which was an area of geothermal activity. It was really cool, there were craters of bubbling mud and massive plumes of steam coming from underground. All was good except for the stench of sulphur, gross. The next place on our list was the Honey Hive. New Zealand has the most delicious honey, and the Honey Hive was basically a place where you could purchase honey based products. The reason we went there was for the free tasting! I didn't realise there were so many different types of honey - the best and most expensive being Manuka, but the tastiest of all was the honey brandy - yum yum!!

On our walk we had found a free campsite which had been left by an orchard farmer after he died. We parked up and this time managed a little fire quite easily, and cooked our corn on the cob and tin of beans. After dinner, we met up with a couple of other travellers that were tourning around in there vans. One of them was actually moving to NZ and had bought the tinest cutest kitten that travelled with him. After a few more people arrived we had quite a little camp fire going and they had brought sausages and steak, which tasted unbelievably good after our beans. We met so many cool people. One of the guys got out his bongos and guitar and had a little jam session. Then randomly quite an old local guy called Andre came over and joined us, with his home brew. Apparently he preferred coming to the campsite then going to the pub, because he met more interesting people. The fire was going low so Andre volunteered to get more fire wood, so off he went in his car and 25 Min's later, after most people had gone home, and there was only 4 of us left, he came back with what looked like an uprooted tree! T the lack of people around he complained that young people these days didn't have the same thirst for life, and in his day he was up until 8 in the morning! More because we felt sorry for leaving his uprooted tree he'd taken so long to fetch, the 4 of us stayed up with him to burn it. Eventually, I was falling asleep where I sat, so we all decided to go to bed, with Andre grumbling about how early it was, which I found unbelievable!

The next morning we had a well needed lie in. We spent the day chilling out. We both got in the freezing river, and Elliott spent most the time jumping from the top of a tree in to it. Dinner that night was sausages and corn on the cob. That night we were joined by some locals, who at first I thought were dodgy and I was a bit unsure about - 'yeah bro' was their favourite phrase. As the night went on they turned out to be really cool people. Very randomly they offered us a trout they had caught in the day (they were seriously not the type of people you would expect to be catching any type of fish!), and they helped Elliott gut it and BBQ it on the coals with lemon and honey. It tasted absolutely delicious, and we saved a lot of it, as it was a massive fish, for sandwiches the next day. The next morning we got up packed away our tent and headed off to Rotaroua. x