After the tour we headed back to Rotorua where we were staying for two nights. On the way, just on the outskirts of Rotorua is a place where you can go on a luge. Now, I wouldn't call it a luge I would call it a go-kart but anyway Margaret had told us all about it and it sounded good fun.
You get on a gondola which takes you to the top of a very high hill and up there are several activities you can do, such as zip lining, mountain biking, wine tasting etc but we just went for the luge. There are three tracks you can go on, training, which every one has to do on the first run, intermediate and skilled.
You get a quick lesson on how to use the luge, once you pass you get a stamp on your hand and off you go. The training route was good, very long, scenic and you do get up to decent speeds. While on this I could see people doing the skilled track and at points they were in the air as they shot down the route.
At the bottom you put your luge on a conveyor belt and you get a chairlift back up to do it all again. On the second go, we decided to do skilled as typically for us the intermediate route was closed. Luckily you can control your speed so I went down this track slower than David shall we say, and at no point was I airborne but David was. He was in his element, loving it, while I was thinking, "How old am I, what are you doing?" I tell you the things he, and on this occasion Margaret get me into!
It was fun though, although you shudder, shake and vibrate all the way down, at one point I thought my glasses were going to come off, but I couldn't take my hands off the handle bars to push them back on
After we had done all our turns, we had 5 each , we headed to the Jelly Belly shop, which was also at the top of the hill. David loves Jelly Belly beans, in this shop they had lots of different types, but also pictures and models made out of jelly beans.
In the evening we went for a walk around the park beside our lodgings. Now, this park was right beside where we were staying and we had driven past it several times but at no time did we notice steam coming out of the ground. As we walked towards it, all you could see was columns of steam rising up. There were loads of areas fenced off due to the thermal areas, which you could walk right up to and see the water bubbling and boiling away. At some points it was also very smelly!
Some bits were like ponds, others puddles and streams. Some were muddy holes with sludge gurgling away in the bottom.
In the picture below the ground has dried with the heat and is peeling, you could actually peel layers off. It was fascinating to see.
Some of the thermal areas are very close to houses which I don't know if I would be happy living there, as there are warnings all over about the unstable ground. We have heard that a young girl fell into one of the pools and died a short while ago.
After our walk in which David found three geocaches we headed back to the room after what had been a very busy day.
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