Post No. 35 - Lakes and Smelly eggs!

My last post was from Lake Taupo although I didn't say anything about the place - we were there for 2 nights. Bit too cold to go out on the lake so just did a lot of walking about. We did go on a tour on a British Double Decker bus which was cool and had a proper Chinese meal - yummy! Bet you can't guess what I had those that know me well?!

Rotorua - the place absolutely bloomin stinks! Its so gross.....people said we would get used to it after half hour but everytime you go outside it just turns your stomach! The reason it smells so bad is because of all the sulphur in the air.

And even though it smells gross, we are glad we came! Today we went on a sightseeing tour. We got picked up from the end of the street (where our hostel is) at 7.40am - yuck! We headed out to a thermal village (pronounced Fakka-weara-weara) after picking everyone up! We got a tour round - its a Maori village with geysers and mud pools - pretty amazing sight! We were told to sit down on some rocks at one point and they were toasty warm! Lovely on a chilly day like today!

Next we headed to Paradise Valley Springs which is a wildlife park. Its mostly native birds and animals they have there although they do have some lions! And there are 2 female cubs which you get to go and play with (except we didn't have time on our tour - will definetly need to go back to do that one day soon!) but we did get to hand-feed some wallabies! Which was fabulous - they were so cute - they put their little paws on your fingers and eat right from your hand!

Our final stop was the Agrodome where we saw a Sheep Show. It was really fun, much better then it sounds! We were intoduced to loads of different kinds of sheep, saw a sheep being sheared, saw some sheepdogs in action, some people got to try milking a cow, some people got to feed baby lambs their bottle (aaaah!) and we got some freshly shorn wool to take away with us!

Hint for link - if you look at the sheep show link - take special care when looking at the top photo - yes the dogs really are on top of the sheep! They run all over them and we got some photos of our own!

Sidenote - we will definetly be returning to the Agrodome in the near future (when its a bit warmer) as we are going to try zorbing (the wet one where they put us both in the same one, throw a bucket of water in then push us down a big hill!)

Tomorrow we head to Whakatane (Fakka-tany), then onto Gisbourne, before another night in Napier and then onto our final destination - Palmy and our new wee house! Yipee!