Hotsprings, Taupo and Turangi

Hi people! We found a library with free WLAN, so I uploaded quickly some pics, and promised to write the comments later. Here they are:

After Napier, we headed towards Mohaka river, where we had read that we could have nice hotspring baths in the middle of the nature for free. The half an hour drive, through steep gravel road, sometimes in first gear, was really worth it! What an amazing place. I guess New Zealand is one of the very few countries in the world were those kind of things can still be found for free.

There were two big bath tubes, more like little swimming pools, since they fitted about 6 people. They were just in the middle of nowhere, with no light and the only mechanism of a flap that could be used to stop the continuous incoming flow of hot water. The first night we met on the pools another young German couple, but after half an hour we were left alone. Very very nice! We were so happy with the place that we decided to stay one more day in the camping area, which was also nice. We met a french family, who were living in Azores Islands and were travelling together with their three children. We had dinner with them, cooked with firewood in a special barbecue container that the Kiwis often have in camping sites. They were really nice people, sadly I can only remember the name of the little daughter:Elvira.

From there we drove a long way to the Taupo lake, which by the way is bigger than the whole Singapore country. We slept there also two nights in a free camping next to the river, which by the way rose quickly, after several hours of non stop rain! We were really happy that we bought a cheap tarp (eine Plane), which was supposed to be used as a sun protector, but ended up allowing us to sit dry under the rain.

The lake Taupo feeds a river which has a very powerful waterfall, see the picture!

We also visited a little art-café, pottery type, that my Mum and Daniela's would love to see. Antonio Gaudí style of broken stark-coloured porcelain mosaic.

For the next days the weather forecast was still predicting rain, so we decided we could do some activity in which water made no difference. So we reserved a half-day grade 3 rafting experience. At the beginning Daniela wasn't very happy with it, but later she loved it too. From this day, for obvious reasons I have no pictures taken with my mobile phone. So sorry...

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