From Taupo to Waitomo

It’s time to give you a short wrap up of the last days. We left from Tongariro to Lake Taupo after a relaxed breakfast on the 24th of April. We both were still processing pictures of the last day. It was cloudy and therefore just perfect for driving. We arrived in Taupo and spent the afternoon and next morning to do some planning, uploads and finding local camping supplier to get that bloody stove fixed :).  In the early afternoon we left towards the west coast. Our plan was to slow down a bit. So we stopped half way to the coast and had our overnight stop at Lake Maraetai. The human made lake is one out of a handful of lakes along the Waikato River. They were created by dams to generate electricity from water power. We got the chance to watch what locals prefer to do on a free sunny day. Obviously they love all kinds of water sports, but especially motor boats and jet skies it seems. When they were gone by sunset, we discovered how quiet and peaceful that place actually is. We spent the weekend in Kawhia, a very small fisher village at the west coast. It’s very remote  and therefore hardly any tourists get losts there. I is quite popular with the locals for fishing on the weekend though. It has  a wide, black sandy beach covered by wild massive dunes. The actual highlight however are the hot springs just a couple of cm underneath your feet at the waterfront at low tide. The only thing you need to do is to bring a shovel, dig yourself a little pool and sit down in it. We did it both days and it’s such a relaxing thing to do. On top you will have a fantastic view of the Tasmanian Sea. On the second day our hot water pool even was so hot that we jumped into the cold sea to cool our overheated bodies :). Happy and relaxed we finished our trip to Kawhia having dinner in the sunset and watching a King Fisher bird hunting for some fish right in front of us. On Monday we treated ourselfs to a Blackwater Rafting Tour in the famous Waitomo Glowworm caves. The region of Waitomo is well known for their wide limestone cave system. Furthermore it is the habitat of millions of glowworms. These little worms spend most of their life down there. They eat and grow properly until they turn into a fly. They light up the caves with their little tail by burning their own excrements. How efficient is that! We had booked a rafting tour through these caves on tyre tubes. We got some wetsuits and went down into the cave by following a little stream that goes through it. In some parts we had to climb over rocks through knee depth water. In other parts we just jumped into our tubes and floated through the cave. When we switched off our lights, we could see the glowworms at the ceiling. They looked like stars at the sky. We reached the exit of the caves floating out in our tubes after 3 hours. Happy and almost frozen we enjoyed a hot shower and a warm soup at the basecamp. Unfortunately we were not allowed to take picture during the tour, so we photographed 2 poster pictures as a reference. On the way to our next stop we found a cute little coffee shop where Natalie had the most amazing coffee in a long time!

 

 

 

 

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