With the parental taxi no longer available we booked ourselves onto a bus to Rotorua later in the day.
As we had our first taste of New Zealand rain in the morning we headed for an indoor attraction: The Shearing Shed. The animals that are sheared here are not sheep but giant German Angora rabbits! We really only went for the comedy value and the huge rabbits were hilarious to look at even when they weren't being sheared. Even though we didn't arrive by Japanese tour bus, the lady in the 'Shed still tried to sell Heather an extortionately priced bunny fur hat. When you consider the amount of effort required to shear a rabbit compared to a sheep, its easy to see why the stuff they sold was so expensive.
We left the shed and jumped on the bus to Rotorua. It was driven by a huge Maori guy who could have passed for an ex-All Black prop. He gave us a commentary based around dairy farming in central North Island as we headed east, through Hobbiton (yes, really), to Rotorua.
Rotorua is famous for the geothermal activity in the area and is very popular with tourists. It is also home to some of the best mountain biking in New Zealand, which makes it very popular with me. In the evening we wandered round the public Kuirau park which you can walk around freely and admire the bubbling mud and boiling lakes. Seeing steam coming out of the ground in random places was quite weird, and then there's the eggy smell which wafts around the town and into your room!
