Waitomo

The weather was not doing us any favours and we ended up having to change our route and go to Waitomo instead! This is what happened: we woke up in Wellington and it was a lovely day, enough sunshine to say 'ooooo shall we wear a skirt or dress today?!?'... I think we were just so fed up with the rain! We went and booked a shuttle bus for the Tongariro Alpine Crossing the next day. They take you to the start of the crossing, and they pick you up nine hours later at a different point on the other side. We drove up the top of Mt. Victoria and looked at the views of the city. You could see right round, from the shipping harbour to the sea. It's a sprawling capital. There are loads of hills everywhere and I noticed a lot of residential houses built on stilts, protruding off the hilltops.

We drove the 4hr drive to Tongariro National Park and arrived in a DOC campsite. I felt pretty miserable, maybe it was the rainy weather and being in the middle of nowhere on a cold night, so Jen cheered me up. While she made hot water bottles, I tackled making the bed (which is far harder with one person) and went to sleep in preparation for our long walk the following morning.

We were so prepared. We had snacks, lunch, water, layers, waterproofs all on us, but no matter how much we did there is always one thing you can't rely on here; the weather. It was still raining and we hurried to the road ready to be picked up at 8am, but nothing came. We called the company off our NZ phone and they told us that it had been cancelled due to the weather. There had been fresh snowfall, the winds were high and the views were poor so it wasn't even worth doing.

We listened to the locals who said to leave the area while the weather was like this for the rest of the week and come back another day, so we decided to head to Waitomo to see the caves.

Two hours later we were there, we were exhausted but after some lunch to pick us up, we visited the Glowworm Caves. Our guide showed us round the caves and have some interesting facts about stalacmites and stalactites, glowworms and the cave itself. We ended the tour on a boat where we went into the darkness and there there were thousands of glowworms. It was hard to gain a perspective of the cave itself, but after a while of adjusting to the light, it was pretty cool seeing the huge number of them in the cave.

We then went to the campsite and sat in the sunshine outside (for once) and had some great chats! We meet a guy from Hamilton in the evening and he advised us on somewhere south of Rotorua that we should visit where there is a natural hot water bath. He told us to 'take a few beers' and chill there one afternoon!