Rotorua Pictures

The whole crew outside Cactus Jack's. This is the only themed hostel in Rotorua, and it is the coolest fake Mexican town. I think there's about 14 of us total.


One of the first things we did in Rotorua was go zorbing. This is a crazy Kiwi invention where you dive Superman-style into a big plastic ball partially filled with soapy water and then proceed to slip and slide down a big hill, as pictured above. It's probably the closest you can ever get to being spun around in a washing machine. To put the ball in perspective, I was inside it with Patrick and Blake, and there was more than enough room for us to stand up (not that we could; we were too busy sliding everywhere!).


After zorbing, we headed off to the AgroDome. Not surprisingly, there was no dome involved, but we did run into these sheep on steroids.


Later that afternoon, we went rafting. That's Krista in the front on the left. Patrick is behind her, and I am across from Patrick. The other three people are three randoms who were put with our group.

Here we are going over the largest commerically rafted waterfall in the world! It's somewhere in the neighbourhood of seven metres or so, and it was amazing. I was really nervous to go over it when we started, but once we got on the river there was no backing out. Our raft went completely under water before popping up again, but we were awesome and stayed right side up!

Of course, every good rafting guide will stear his boat back into a waterfall or two so that he can absolutely soak the people in front. At this particular moment, it is Krista and myself who are getting drenched.

The next day we all piled in our cars to go caving in the Waitomo caves. Our particular tour had lots of abseils, especially over waterfalls. It was cool to need a light and wetsuit and everything in the cave, but I would not recommed wearing gumboots to rock climb!

Part of our caving tour involved crawling through a shallow part of the river under some low-lying rocks. Turns out there was an alternate dry route, though, as our guide met us on the other side!