another quickie post

[dancingyel]

hi again! just wanted to do another excited update...david and i are in a town called rotorua (which we're leaving tomorrow, but no matter) and so far, over the last 2 days, we've visited a maori village with geysers and mud pools, seen a maori cultural show, gotten massages at a sulhpur spa thing, zorbed (rolled down a hill in a giant plastic ball), seen a sheep show with 19 breeds of sheep, and toured a working organic farm. so much fun! and the day before rotorua, we visited matamata, where the hobbiton section of lord of the rings was filmed.

tomorrow, on to tongariro national forest, which was mordor in lord of the rings. weee!!!

Comments

[stellae.livejournal.com]

I'm stalking you!

We got to Rotorua yesterday... went to a Hangi at Mitai... I think some of the other ones would have been better as far as culture was concerned, but my dad and brother didn't so much care... and Mitai had glowworms. :-)

And tomorrow, Ben and I are doing the Tongariro Crossing dayhike! :-D

(Today I think we have Zorbing and a visit to Wai-O-Tapu planned).

[dancingyel.livejournal.com]

heh...i think you guys are at the same place as us now, because in about 20 minutes, david and i are gonna do a day hike in the tongariro forest. not the crossing, but still pretty much the same place. heh. it would be funny if we were staying at the same place. david and i are at the skotel alpine resort thing.

[stellae.livejournal.com]

I think you were better off in the forest... the crossing was hard and wet. very wet. Though being able to say I climbed partway up Mt. Doom is pretty cool... (no summit, b/c of really bad weather, and so much rain/fog I didn't really get pictures of the shape. But I did walk by it! :-))

Also, a lot of the trek was really beautiful, and some I know would have been absolutely amazing on a good day.

Also: Yay for Zorbs!

[dancingyel.livejournal.com]

yeah, it was so wet and foggy all through the day, and the drive out of the national park was a mess. still, it was very appropriately mordor-ish weather, so we definitely got the feel of it. and then were glad to get back to our room with heat and hot showers.

zorbing is much fun! i wish we had something like that in san francisco!

where are you guys now? we're in wellington 'till saturday morning, and then we fly home.

[stellae.livejournal.com]

Wellington, but we fly to queenstown first thing in the morning.

My dad and I drove out to Martinborough to go wine tasting today and stopped to see Rivendell at Kaitoke Regional Park on the way back. :-)

We should see if we can get any of our engineer friends to build zorbs... there are plenty of grassy hills around...