Friday 26th January – Mount Maunganui and reaching Rotorua

The agreement with the owners of the marina was that in return for a cheap night’s stay, we’d be out of the way by 730am.  So, we set an alarm, woke up and drove a short distance away to have brekkie.  That should get our body clocks adjusted to NZ time properly!

Mount Maunganui (far left of picture) and it's beautiful beach

We drove on to Mount Maunganui, a popular spot to climb, but only very early in the morning on a hot day like today.  So, instead, we did some people watching and had an ice-cream!  A friendly local approached me whilst I was looking at this memorial:

The Rena memorial - the island behind it is where the penguins live

He told me that this was to commemorate the grounding of the Marine Vessel Rena in October 2011 on the reef here.  But the story here is not about the unfortunate grounding but celebrates the collaboration of the local community afterwards in rescuing and rehabilitating as much of the penguin population as possible that were soaked in oil after the disaster. 

The sea was too inviting, we had to make time for a quick swim, where we had waves breaking on us in two directions! We stopped there for lunch and we had work to do.  Clearly, we had been so focussed on our last month’s activities in Australia that we had not adequately prepared for the North Island here and we needed to get more organised if we were going to make the most of our time.

So, we did some online booking for Rotorua where we planned to tick off a couple of ‘must-do’ activities.  That night we were set to do luging.  We found that there were limited spaces on tours of Hobbiton all week but we managed to get a spot reserved for tomorrow.  It was then as we made our way to Rotorua that we realised we should’ve done Hobbiton today as we were nearly passing it on the way!

We’d been shocked by the price of some of the attractions on-line so once we reached Rotorua we headed for our old favourite, the VC, to ask about various Maori experiences and hot springs as there are many to choose from.  We would have to limit what we can do if we don’t want to be penniless!

It seems that staying anywhere in Rotorua also comes with a tourism-edged price, but we found a deal on one of our Apps that saved us a little money at a site called Cosy Cottage.  Like most of the campsites here, it is situated on or very near sulphur springs.  In fact, the whole of Rotorua smells at least faintly of eggs. We had two hours to relax and have some dinner before our luging.  I went for a walk and saw some amazing geothermal activity right behind where we were parked.  The footpath was steaming, had even collapsed in some areas and there was bubbling mud in various places.

Where's the sulphur springs? Somewhere on the left through all that smoke I think.....

We may have had our plans that evening, but the weather had other ideas.  Looking at dark grey clouds looming, I realised that I didn’t have time to make dinner before the heavens were going to open.  As we sought shelter in the camper, hail the size of 10p coins bashed into the top of the van. They say that the weather in NZ is changeable. It was hard to believe that it was still the same day we had been bathing in boiling hot sun at the beach only a few hours ago.

We waited until about 7pm but there seemed no end to the deluge.  I rang the Skyline resort who confirmed that they had closed the luge for the night due to weather conditions.  I tried to get them to re-schedule for a different time tomorrow but we had to re-book for the same slot to remain on our deal (bookme.com also covers NZ, hooray!)  As a result, tomorrow is going to be a very busy day!

As you could see from last night's photos, our camper was for fine-weather catering only. So, as we had no shelter to cook in, Simon got his way and we had $5 Dominos’ Pizzas instead. (That’s about £2.60 for an individual pizza each – crazy cheap and too good to turn down).  We ate in the camper, watching the rain fall over lake Rotorua.

Our plans may have been changed by things out of our control but I took the chance to enjoy a relaxing hot mineral bath in one of the varied temperature baths available on site.  Turns out I went for the hottest one. So I stayed in as long as I could stand before cooling off in the shower before bed.