Friday 21st November

Well, a couple of hours after we were last in touch, we were in an accident! No major harm to anybody, in fact no injury, but we now have a badly buckled back step to the van after a woman ran into us in a traffic queue - luckily at very low speed. But caused us a headache as, being just north of Auckland, the company wanted us to go back to the depot in SW Auckland to do the paperwork - which meant driving across the city and then eventually driving out through rush-hour, which was no more fun than rush hour in any big city. However, perhaps did us a favour as we ended up for the night on a beautiful site we might not have found otherwise, up in the hills above a brown coal mining area. Waingaro is a hot springs area, in the hills near Hobbiton from Lord of the Rings, so you can imagine the countryside. (Just like the Lickey Hills.) There were several beautifully warm pools(about 30 degrees), and we swam last night as the stars were coming out, and then again this morning as the maggies sang. Drove through amazing countryside then to Waitomo where the glow-worm caves are, another gorgeous area. We first went on the glow-worm tour, walking through limestone caves 30 million years old then riding a boat below thousands of twinkling glow-worms - a creature of fairly unpleasant habits but a beautiful experience. Like the Southern Hemisphere skies at night. We then toured another cave system, Ruarikiri. This started with an artificial entrance as the Maori have declared the original entrance a religious site, so they spent millions on a 60 metre spiral walkway and artificial tunnels to enter the system. The watercut channels were fantastic incredibley deep and narrow with very pale dripstone curtains as well as the usual stalactites and stalagmites. The gloworms here were reflected in the water in the bottom of the channels, heaven above and below. A quite stunning 2 hours finishing with seeing the bones of the extinct flightless Moai bird which stood 3.5 metres high a lot to get into your McChicken sandwich.
We then drove to Rotorua and selected a lakeside campsite. The lake has waves like the sea and is huge. The beach is made from ash and pumice and if you dig in the sand the water fills the hole and is then the temperature of a warm bath because the sands are hot. Within 50 metres of our camp pitch there is a hot pool steaming sulphur and a 6 foot bubbling mass of boiling mud. Fenced off of course. You can bathe in a choice of three free hot tubs and even practice cooking in the hot sands and mud. It's he weirdest city - steam drifting everwhere, and very smelly! So much to do here, on every known form of transport - we don't know where to start tomorrow. (Assuming there's no eruption...)

Just to give a general idea of NZ countryside up here in the north - imagine England in May, buttercups and daisies , blackbirds and thrushes singing - but with mad honeyeaters in sub-tropical vegetation above, and even more peculiar flightless birds, pukekos, rather like huge moorhens, falling over their own feet. Dairy cattle everywhere, up in the north the landscape a mixture of Scottish farmland and Victoria, down here the mountains are higher and volcanic cones scattered around. Weather like May too, can be very warm but also cold and blustery - and hay-fever-inducing!