An Adventurous Weekend!

The girls at Huka Falls on the way to Taupo

Jumping into Lake Taupo off of Bully Point after white water rafting

Continuing to "jump around NZ" with a nice view of Taupo in the background

My nice smooth standing skydive landing!

8 in the Merc for the white water rafting!

Mini waterfall jump inside the caves in Waitomo

Another jump with Sophie off Bully Point

Bubbling mud pool inWai-O-Tapu

Champagne Lake in Wai-O-Tapu with temperatures recorded up to 300 degrees Celsius

Devil's Bath, BRIGHT green pool in Wai-O-Tapu

Exiting the plane over Lake Taupo

The snow-capped peak is Mt. Ruhapehu to the left in the distance

My jumping buddy, Brad and my filmer/photographer...forgot her name...oops!

To start with, an update on the pie front...it came out delicious!! Very tasty indeed and John and Julia really liked it.  The kids however, were a different story.  As far as they're concerned pumpkin is a veggie and so they weren't so keen on eating it as a dessert as well...one little taste (more like touching it to their tongue) was enough and decided they didn't like it.  John said we'd have been better off calling it "American" pie to get them to try it.  Then after, since there were two, they just told them one was pumpkin and the other was apricot...similar color I guess...?  I'm not too sure if that worked or not, but I did bring some in the car Friday morning on the drive down to the caves and most of the girls really enjoyed it, none of them had had it before either (apart from the Californian of course who was driving the other car anyway)!

The first stop was our Black Labyrinth tubing/caving tour through Rurakuri cave in the freezing, eel-infested waters wearing our head lights.  When we were instructed to turn them off and we looked up we could see millions of glow worms attached to the ceiling.  It reminded me of the small world ride at Disney World minus the music with a slightly more creepy atmosphere.  We learned that these glow worms are really just a species of fly larva that have a special chemical reaction in their excrement that makes it light up to attract food that they then trap in their long slimy/sticky strings that hang down.  Luckily most of them were pretty far above us that we didn't have to worry about getting stuck in the strings too!  We also did a couple of waterfall jumps inside the cave, situating your tube and then just jumping backwards into the darkness, waiting for the splash!  Then the guides made us play "find your own way out of the cave in the dark" letting me lead the way in the front.  Luckily, I saw one sneak behind a wall so I knew to keep going and didn't have her jump out at me like she did to a few people down the line!

After the tour we were provided with hot showers (mainly to get rid of the stinky wetsuit smell and warm up a bit) and a bagel and soup.  Then it was back in the cars to drive on towards Taupo.  On the way we stopped at Huka Falls and took some photos of the Lake Taupo from the lookout point.  We checked into our hostels (hoping we'd still have beds since there were 10,000 cyclists in town for the Southern Hemisphere's largest cycling event, the round-the-lake challenge, 106km or something...) and then went to eat dinner.  We were all pretty tired from an early morning, long drive and 1st day of adventure, plus we wanted to get a good night's sleep so that we could fully enjoy our skydiving experiences at 8am Saturday morning!

Saturday we were picked up just before 8am by the skydive place and taken to get suited up after we'd decided on packages and heights and all that!  Five other girls and I did the 15,000ft jump and the other 4 did the 12,000ft one.  I purchased the silver package which included the jump, a dvd and photos and a "free" t-shirt.  This was a GREAT purchase because a camera person jumps alongside you and films the whole thing, in addition to taking some pretty awesome photos!  The whole experience was probably the most incredible feeling ever!  The plane ride up was nice as well, just a tad cramped, to get to see the beautiful views (we couldn't have asked for a better day)!  All the directions are so simple and everything kind of goes so quickly once it's time to dive, there's really no time to think about being scared!  After sitting on the edge with your legs out and getting your picture taken, you're falling through the sky before you know it!  The first tiny part of the drop feel like a roller-coaster but you kind of adjust right away and realizing you're speeding through the sky seeing the world from a whole new perspective.  The free fall lasts about 1 minute, but you're going so fast the wind actually started to hurt a bit after that!   I enjoyed when the parachute was pulled and you could kind of sit up and relax and enjoy the views and look around and go for a different sort of ride!  This is definitely something I would do again if it weren't such an expensive hobby!!

We met again back at one hostel and walked to a cafe in downtown Taupo for a coffee and something to eat before heading off to Turangi to white water raft down the Tongariro river.  We were told to make an early start because tons of cyclists would be on the road at that time.  Sure enough, there were TONS, luckily all headed the opposite direction as us so we didn't have too much of a driving delay.  The drive around the lake as we headed down to Turangi was gorgeous as well!  We arrived just in time for our raft trip (after a pretty hot and crowded ride squeezing 8 in the merc since only 8 out of 11 of us the came were rafting) and got geared up in yet more wetsuits and ready to go!  We were a group all ourselves, 2 boats of 4 with a Kiwi guide and yet another Canadian guide (the guy that worked at our hostel in Rotorua was also Canadian!).  The raft trip was beautiful as well, not quite as adventure-filled as we'd hoped, but a nice outing nonetheless.  The highlight was probably when we stopped for some cliff jumps into the ice-cold water!  The also provided each boat with a camera so we could take our own pictures.  Once again we were provided with sandwiches and hot drinks afterward and got to view all our pictures on the TV.  The guides told us about a jump at Bully Point into Lake Taupo on the drive back to get the other 3 girls.  It's not labeled at all, you just have to know that on the first sharp bend in the road where the speed drops to 25km/hr you pull off just before the guardrails and follow a little path out to the rocks where you can jump off into the lake.  So of course on our way back we had to stop and take a few jumps!  We'd jumped out of plane that morning OVER the lake, so now we might as well jump off a cliff into it as well!!

It was still SO hot after 7pm, we found the other 3 girls sitting on the beach in Taupo so we joined them and Jenny and I went for another swim in the lake before we hopped back in the cars and carried on our way to Rotorua.  Once there we checked into the hostel and wandered around town for a bit, eating at Burger Fuel, pretty delicious actually...and then once again, tired from the day, heading to sleep early!

Today we went on a 3k walk around Wai-O-Tapu, a geothermal wonderland, seeing bubbling mud pools and geysers and craters and sulfer mounds and strangely-colored hot pools and steaming smelly holes in the ground.  All different kinds of volcanic-related activity!  I could definitely NOT live in Rotorua!  The entire city smelled awful like sulfur or rotten eggs!  When there was a breeze it was a bit more bearable, but for the most part, the place stank!   We drove out to the ZORB place, but decided that it wasn't really worth it for the price.  The hill that you rolled down was pretty small and you didn't really even roll around inside the ball...it also was not on the list of top 5 things to do in Rotorua in our hostel!  We checked out Lake Rotorua from the Polynesian spa, and even the edges there were steaming...not too sure anyone actually bathes in it.  Then we found a nice ice cream place, had one last group "meal" and began the 3 hour drive back to Auckland and the process of dropping everyone back home.  Apparently, NZ has a huge possum problem, kind of like we have tons of dead squirrels in the roads in Massachusetts, NZ has a LOT of possum road kill!  Sophie and I decided to play the dead possum game...we counted 86 road kill possums after we left Rotorua on the way back to Auckland!!  That is a lot of road kill!  We didn't even count some smaller birds and things that maybe could have been hedgehogs at one point. 

To sum up, it was a FANTASTIC weekend!! And hopefully all of the photos/videos will be online in some shape or form when the internet speeds up!