Road trip Rotorua (week 7 and 8)

The first week and weekend were chill. I went to Attack on titans 2 the movie. I don’t know why I did that, but it was even worse than the first one. Also in the weekend we went to mount Eden again. Nothing special, but still as beautiful as before. Also on a Thursday evening we ate, with 30 people of studenttrips together, for 5$ unlimited chicken wings. You can’t do much wrong for that price and of course it was cozy with that amount of people.

We did a road trip to Rotorua with 4 people (Christoph, Ronald, marten and I). I had some troubles with booking, because I started booking after 5 pm on a Friday to hire a car for Saturday morning. I booked everything on their site, but I got rejected after 5min. Then I found another company to book a car, unfortunately I’m just 20 years old and born in 1995 (so young). Only people from the year 1994 and before 1994 could book. Luckily I’m the youngest of our group, so after filling in someone else his data the car was booked…. To be sure that everything was alright I called the company, but he just quited working and said that he will confirm at 8 am in the morning if we could pick up the car at 8:30 am.

In the morning we woke up and prepared to leave even if we didn’t know if we get the car. Through the email I received the News (English version of my name) that everything was fine and we could come to pick up the car. After some paper stuff I jumped in the car behind the steering wheel. This is more special than you think, because the steering wheel was on the right sight and people drive here on the left side. After getting our stuff we drove to Rotorua. Driving on the left side is not that hard. You just have to concentrate on the position of the car. You want to go too far to the left; because normally you have more space on the left side, but here you have half your car on that side.

I was happy that I prepared myself for the road; because Maarten, who was sitting shotgun, was useless. At a point I didn’t know where to go, he just said wait and kept on playing games on his phone instead of studying the map. Normally people stay awake when they sit shotgun, but he was sleeping a lot… After 200km we had a pause where we stretched our legs, ate some food, went to the toilet and I also called the hotel to reserve a room for that day (perfect on time). We also switched positions, I could sit shotgun and relax. Unfortunately not too long, there was an accident on our road and we had to take another one. After checking out the map, I found another way and we continued our journey.

We immediately drove to the mountain bike park to hire a mountain bike. We red that there is a mountain bike route that’s in the top 10 mountain bike routes of the world. We drove up the mountain through the red forest. It’s so red because all the needles that fell down are red and also the barks of the trees were brown/red (a shame you can’t really see it on the pictures). We mountain biked 3.5 hours in total and it was harder than expected. It was literally a pain in the ass(not figuratively), but in the end I was happy that I did it. I do understand why it is one of the top 10 routes, it was so beautifull and so much fun to go down the mountain (going up is not fun at all). After a nice dinner, checking in, chilling in the hot tub and drinking some beer we went to bed.

The next day we went to Kerosine creek (an outdoor hot spring). We had some struggle and we had to ask three times for the way after that we finally found it. After parking our car we walked down the river to go to the creek. After changing in our bath clothes we went into the water. The water was around body temperature (PERFECT). We stayed there some time and enjoyed the hot water, nature and sun. After some time we left and went back to Auckland.

PS: I wrote the blog later than expected, but in the end I found some time to finish it.