Illness and white island
Trip Start
Jul 12, 2006
1
104
230
Trip End
Jun 18, 2007
Rotorua,
New Zealand
Thursday, November 16, 2006
The drive was pretty non-eventful; the roads on this side of the country are slightly busier but nothing major
A hot steaming, geothermal mess at hells gate
. I think they get busier the further up towards Auckland you go, but at the moment we're doing ok. As we were heading kind of North East we decided to stop at Hell's Gate, another of the geo-thermal parks. We were pretty unlucky with the weather today, I think we'd used up all our luck on the nice weather over the last couple of days because it was pouring down, which isn't the best weather to be wandering around geo-thermal areas as the rain just turns to steam and you can't see a thing. Still, we got a guided tour around Hell's Gate but because the rain was so hard we didn't hang about and didn't really look at too much. The best thing about the trip was the carving that we got to do. It was only a little go, but right at the end there was a man with little wooden plaques with Maori designs drawn on them and we got a go at carving them out. Not as easy as they make it look, but both Lee and I did pretty well, Lee took the easy Silver Fern design that lacked corners but I went straight in for the deep end selecting a very curvy one. Chiseling around corners is pretty tricky but I made it. They both looked pretty good when varnished, so watch out; one of you might get it as a Christmas present! It didn't take too long to get to Whakatane, we had a little drive about but the town was pretty much like most of the other ones we'd see. Lots of car shops, a McDonalds, KFC, supermarket etc... we stopped at the info centre to check the weather and then had a little walk around town but it wasn't as nice as some of the places we'd been too
Danger area, you're not kidding
. I spotted a few carloads of hoodies cursing around town and decided that it probably wasn't a good idea to leave our car, and it's contents, on its own for very long. It was early evening so we decided to check out a couple of BBH hostels and settled on the second one we saw as they had a double room available. Lee's caught my germs big time now and was feeling poorly so we wandered down to the local fish and chip shop, stocked up on lush (and very cheap) fresh fish and garlic chips (yum yum!) and headed back to our room. Normally we're a bit more social able in hostels but Lee was quite poorly and I haven't recovered from my cold in Franz Joseph so we decided to hole ourselves up in bed and watch a movie on the laptop. We started watching Pirates of the Caribbean before we remembered that we'd already seen it then swapped to the new Superman movie, which was quite good really. It was a much deserved night in I think; we both need it to be honest. In fact we both need a good day in bed relaxing and not doing to try and get over our bugs, but the likelihood of that happening is very remote so we'll just have to try and do our best to kick it some other way. Nadene, the host of the hostel, had booked us onto the boat trip tomorrow so after the film, it was bedtime and a much needed sleep. 
