Ohakune, Watimo and Taupo

Ohakune is situated at the base of a volcano, which would have been nice if the weather wasn’t so horrendous! We continued driving and arrived in Watimo. We did the free walk at the nearby nature reserve both during the day and at night. We went up and down hills through tunnels and caves with waterfalls and rivers everywhere.

Once the sun had set we got out our torches and did the walk again spotting glow worms as we went. We got to see hundreds of glow worms all lit up like L.E.Ds on the mud walls of the path. It looked really cool and they looked just like the stars, of which there were thousands that night.

On the way to Ohakune we went through the town of Wanganui which was a nice old-timer type town on the river. It was really pretty and had an old coal steam boat.

Taupo is a good town if you like skydiving as there is not much else to do.

Luckily we were meeting up with our friends Lizzie, Fiona and Georgie from our Africa trip and their German hitchhiker friend Dennis. We spent the majority of our time with them reminiscing and catching up on each other’s travels.

We all went to Huka Falls which is a huge waterfall that transports over 200,000 litres of water a minute; enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool every minute. Our friends knew of a thermal pool which turned out to be at the top of the Huka Falls river, but it was more like a ditch that had thermally heated water running into it. So we gave it a miss but they said it was good.

When we left our friends we headed back up North to Papamoa beach and the Bay of Plenty.

For our last few days in New Zealand we headed back up to the Bay of Plenty and back to Papamoa beach.

It has to be one of our favourite places with soft sandy beaches, nice houses and Mount Manunganui. We decided to climb the mountain, which is steeper than it looks but has the most amazing views over everything.

Over the next few days we are heading back up to Auckland to meet our friends again and then we will be heading off to the Cook Islands to celebrate Kirstie’s 21st birthday.

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