Hello from Rotorua

Greetings everyone,

I'm writing this post from a very small internet cafe in Rotorua (on New Zealand's North Island, most well-known for their hot springs..... and that the entire town smells like sulfur!) It's pouring rain, so a nice time to sit down and write an update. We have been very busy the last week traveling around the North Island in a rented campervan (I have decided to put my "learning to drive a 5-speed" lessons on hold until we get to Australia where there are much straighter, flatter roads than here.) Steve has done a fantastic job of getting us around the island- remembering to stay on the left, and basically navigating what feels like a giant box on the curvy roads of the Northland. We have basically been doing a town or two a day, so here are some highlights of the last week:

-Driving along the eastern coast from Auckland to Keri Keri- seeing the beautiful Bay of Islands and basically every other beautiful scenery you can imagine (literally every hill you go around could be a post card, it's absolutely amazing)
-Stopping at the Hundterwasser Toilets (interesting piece of "functional" art in a small town- the same artist that's done buildings in Europe, especially Austria)- apparently he spent the latter half of his life in NZ and decided to contribute to the local area through an artistic project
-The Kauri Forest (the giant Kauri trees are amazing- some are over 50 meters tall, you basically drive through the middle of the forest with these trees towering around you)
-Sheepworld-yes, truly a stop for tourists, but all joking aside it was actually pretty fun/interesting. We were the only ones there (go figure it being a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of nowhere), so we got our own personal show featuring sheep dogs, sorting sheep (I got to volunteer to help sort about 20 sheep into different turnstiles- don't think I'd make it in that line of work), sheep shearing (the world record is held by a Kiwi- about 790 sheep sheared in 9 hours), and we both got to feed baby lambs.
-Yesterday was the coolest thing we've done to-date- we went blackwater rafting in the Waitomo Glow Worm Caves. This involved wearing a wet suit, repelling down a 35 meter hole (it's literally a hole in one spot) into limestone caves, then ziplining, tubing, swimming, floating, and climbing our way for the next 4 hours through these amazing caves that have glow worms living along the top (the actual explanation of these creatures is much less appealing, so we'll stick with the name "glow worms"). It was us, 4 UK girls, and two guides, and it was AMAZING! After weaving our way through the caves, the last adventure was rock climbing out of 3 water falls in the caves (Steve and I definitely agreed that they could never get away with something like that back in the States.)

OK, running out of $ in the internet machine, have to stop the post. We're still alive, and having fun!

Cheers,
Anna