Birchwood Spa Motel Rotorua

As pig flu arrives in teh bay of plenty, i've departed ( this isn't the reason i've left, i'm just providing you with piece of trivia).

After a slightly later than planned last night in Tauranga i've managed to get up, get the bags on my bike,check out and with only a slight wobble set off into a lovely sunny morning remarkably only a tiny 25mins later than ...

... though. The performance in front of the girls is most embarrassing. I find the fattest person possible (old swede guy is even in moderate state of health) - the Maori chief and stand alongside him looking considerably thinner and white/pinker. I go through the moves a couple of times and at the end present my Maori tongue face with jazz hands as if I'm facing a pantomime audience as opposed to a bunch of bone crunching rugby players. It's all ...

... with a bathroom & kitchen and bedroom and t.v. so much cheaper than in Aukland. We don't know, however, if it is a touist flat, motel unit, self contained unit, cabin, kitchen cabin or any number of other possibilities. All we know is it is clean and comfortable and affordable!! Off somewhere else in a few days - East of the North somewhere!

... one else in it. We talked it over and it just did not make sense for us to ruin the trip by getting our window broken and stuff stolen. So, we decided to bag the trek to the beach and leave the hot tub for another safer time. A2's 40D has stopped working and based on internet research it looks like we will have to take it in for repair. There are a few tricks we can try but it would seem the shutter is failing which means ...

... various lakes, craters and holes, each one with different colors, with hot steam coming out of them, spread across it. Artist's palette lake (a lake that has many different colors in it, changing with the wind direction) is probably the most impressive of all. We did endure the hot smelly steam to take some good pics. We will not go into the details of the "interesting" conversations that took place during our walk in the park, based on the ...

... on something which made us go left, right etc. And of course by now, we were horizontaol rather than vertical! And finally, about 8 or 9 minutes after we'd flipped out of the plane, we landed on the ground to a welcoming party trying to catch the parachute. Eric kept telling me to 'stand up', 'stand up'; well, Eric I was doing my best to stand up, I was just a bit wobb ly, but I did OK, I didn't fall over, I did keep myself upright (which helpfully meant ...

... was to go zorbing. Zorbing, you ask? What the heck is that? A zorb (noun) is a giant plastic ball. To zorb (verb), you climb into the giant plastic ball and then roll down a hill. Now, you may ask yourself, why on earth would anyone want to do this? As the 17 year-old son from the British family we met while in the Daintree rain forest put it: "Why not?" I had read about it years ago and always wanted to try it. So had Connie, which is one ...

... we wanted to try the Zorb, rolling down a hill inside a ball, with water. It turned out to be a bit disappointing, the hill wasn't that big or steep and the price at 50 dollars per go was too much for us. So we just took a few pics and headed back to the campsite to bake ourselves in the sun. The sun here is unbelievably hot, it burns your skin really easily and we took some cooling dips in the pool. Later we hit the spa ...

... the following reason: Formerly impressive rapids had a big dam built right above them so that they are dry for most of the day, but as the Kiwis cherish their tourists they open the flood gates twice a day for 10 minutes to let the rapids swell up like a theatrical performance for the ...