After Uncle Boy's we went to Rotorua, a city that don't smell pretty. The reason: Rotura is an area of high geothermal activity. And that means you have hot springs and boiling mud pools and all sorts of exciting things - and you have sulphur. A lot of it, really. So the whole city smells of rotten eggs.

Our driver told us that if you are a Kiwi you never buy a car from Rotorua since the sulphur in the air really damages them and let's them rust quicker or something. I don't know about that, but I do know that that city really stinks!

Don't let me sleep alone!

I still had a good time there, though. The night we arrived we all went out on the piss and I got really, really drunk. I was a bit pissed up with Stray that evening since I had booked something called "Straybeads", which essentially means taht you prepay your accomodation and get another dollar discount in return. what they didn't tell me though was that where you stay depends on the agent you have booked through. And so it was like everyone on the bus was supposed to stay at Base wheeras I was to stay at HotRocks. Considering that we had just had this great bonding experience with the Haka, I thought this really sucked and so paid for Base even though I already had paid for HotRocks. Grrrr. 21 Dollars down the drain. But to me it was simply more important to be with everyone.

Rock-climbing in the morning

The next morning I went on a climbing wall for the first time. Since I liked climbing around in Karijini and on Ayers Rock so much, I really wanted to get a climbing wall a try and the Base in Rotorua has a climbing wall on it's premises (16 NZD, very reasonable I think) so I convinced Ross and Christin, two Americans who were on the bus, to go with me. Actually Ross didn't need much convincing since he had done this before and Christin was happy to just belay. And I really had a great time! I really should do this more often when I get back to Germany. In fact, Sibylle, a very good friend of mine, has been climbing for years and I never considered going with her. I managed to negotiated grade 13 walls, but didn't complete any of the grade 14. We could have stayed longer, but after an hour or so I just felt how I didn't have any strength in my arms left - I just couldn't pull myself up any longer - so we left. But since a childrends birthday-posse of 40 kids had just arrived, that probably wasn't much of a loss anyway.

A lovely bath in a hot stream

On the way to Taupo James drove us to a hot stream he knows nearby Rotorua. The water was 35 degrees warm and more lovely than you can imagine. Ok, it did smell of sulphur, but that was easy enough to ignore. The cool thing was, that this stream just flows steaming through the countryside and is - unlike the hot springs in Rotorua - free. Nice.

On the web:
Rotorua (Official website)