It’s so weird! When I’m traveling here I’m so busy having so much fun and everything seems so normal but then I realise “I’m on holiday in New Zealand!” And I have to kick myself to believe it.

Rotorua was awesome! Bubbling pools of thick mud and boiling pools of clear water stained blue with cobalt surrounded by skeletal branches of trees bleached white with the silica. Rocks stained Canary yellow with sulphur and bridges over boiling rivers. It was seriously cool, and definitely felt like something out of a fantasy novel (although some of the mud pools definitely looked prehistoric). It’s hard not to feel like a badass when you feel yourself emerging from the mists into a landscape like the front doorstep to hell.

It’s so strange to just see steam rising from the forest, filling the valley floor with billowing smoke. And I know this is gonna sound daft but it’s really cool to see such pointy hills! We don’t get hills this pointy at home!

In the evening we walked through the redwood forest on these little walkways suspended from the trees. At night they lit up parts of the forest but even so it was only when we came back to walk the forest floor during the day that I could appreciate JUST HOW HUGE those trees are!
If anyone is coming to NZ any time soon I totally recommend here! Any holiday pictures you take will look totally awesome! 😉

The cool thing is that when driving between Rotorua and Taupo we were on a winding road through steep green hills that could be the downs of the shire, then through a thick, dark forest that really could be Fangorn and for just a moment I’m in Middle Earth. Damn, I wish I’d remembered to bring my cloak! Also, as I wrote this, just driving along I’ve seen that one of the hills is smoking! Like thick white smoke coming out of the top of a hill … casual … 
So … just on the way forwards from Taupo now. That was awesome! One of the coolest bits was when we went to where part of the barrel-rapids scene was filmed in the Hobbit. It’s a river going into the lake and normally it’s just a small, relatively slow moving streamlet with clear pools. But then twice a day they open the dam gates a little and all this water comes rushing through and the river swells up a good four meters to become a huge, roaring stretch of rapids. And you can stand on the bridge over it which is kinda awesome.

We also took a nice boat trip on the lake to see the Maori carvings at sunset. I looked at them and thought “wow, they must be ancient, I wonder when they were carved” … the seventies! Not quite as ancient as I thought!

It’s my birthday today as we drive over to Waitomo. This morning I got the most fantastic long blue Merino wool cloak from mum and dad. And it is so thick and warm, I think I could be walking in a full hurricane and the wind won’t be getting through. I can’t wait to wear it tomorrow to Hobbiton (with the elf ears I bought of course)! I think it’s the most majestic cloak I have!

Well, I’m back now! The glow worm caves were amazing but even better than the caves was a walk me and dad did afterwards. It took us on a wooden walkway on the side of a gorge with the water rushing below us and through natural stone tunnels, eventually ending in a platform reaching out into a huge cavern with a river at the bottom, dotted with stalegtites.

We stood there as the sun set and the glow worms came out like greeny blue stars on the roof of the cave. It was seriously awesome! 😀 Then we walked back in the dark (I wouldn’t let dad use his torch), and found that all the stone walls and trees that we’d passed earlier were in fact full of constellations of glowworms! And the best thing was that it was free! I tried to take so many pictures and not one really came out as any good!

Hobbiton was … well, Hobbiton was Hobbiton. I didn’t expect it to be as amazing as the film set. I expected it to be kinda small and gimmicky. In fact it was neither of those things, it was big and it was really brilliant! There were really huge pumpkins (apparently the guardeners were having a competition) and so many Hobbit holes and flowers and vegetables and the old mill… I even got to have a pint of (surprisingly delicious) ale in the Green Dragon! It was really a dream come true!

With dad having left today there’s a bit of the whole end-of-the-holidays-gloom in the air but it’s only two more days until the weekend!