Hello again!!!
It's getting harder and harder to get some useful Internet time here. But we got four hours off this afternoon in Rotorua and the price for Internet at the public library was the best so far.
We left Napier on Sunday and drove quite a slippery gravel road for a while. The big vans didn't have a problem, but the Mazda was all over the place for a while. Luckely it wasn't the most busy street on NZ. At night we ended up at the bottom of the largest mountain (it is a volcanoe) on the North Island. I don't remember the spelling of the name (there are lots of Maori names up here) but it was one of two volcanoes that was focus for the Lord of the Rings movies. The other one was visible from the first one.
The next day we went on a guided hike up to the crater lake of the volcanoe. I think the hike took about 6 hours in sometimes quite steep terrain. It was a beautiful hike though since we were lucky with the weather again!!! Probably the best part of the day was sliding downhill in the thick layer of volcanic ash. It was also an efficient way to get down. I think it took about four hours to get to the crater lake and walking around up there and one to two hours to get down again. I think the guide said that the volcanoe is the largest ski area in NZ or maybe it just was on the North Island. Anyway the moon landscape with lots of boulders laying around everywhere gets covered with about 4 meters of snow in about a month. There were a few glaciers on top too, and a so called dead ice which was more of a glacial field because it was all flat except some holes into the ice.
On the way to Taupo that afternoon we stopped for a visit in a geothermally heated pool. It was great especially since the lift ride down from the volcanoe was quite cold.
Today we have only driven from Taupo to Rotorua which is about one to two hours drive. We still managed to stop at Crater of the Moon (a geothermally active spot that more or less was craeted by humans when too much water was used in a geothermally power station which made the ground around the station to collapse and g. activity reaching the surface) as well as at the power station that created CotM.
We were planning to visit a Maori centre today, but the prices had risen so much since last time our supervisor was there so we decided not to. Instead we are spending the afternoon in Rotorua trying to work on our project.
Tomorrow we will drive to Waitomo Caves for some exciting cave activities with glowing worms!!! I'm excited!!!
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