-Chapter 24- Travel: Rotorua, Wai-O-Tapu & Taupo

After the completely planned Coromandel week, we had planned to take it a little easier for the next trip. We wanted to be a bit more spontaneous and decide during the trip where we wanted to go the next day. But because we can't completely do without a plan, the route was somewhat predefined: we had booked a room in a hotel in Wellington for the Christmas holidays to get out of the car for a change. That meant we had exactly two weeks to see the rest of the North Island. It also felt a bit like that. We visited Rotorua, although this city didn't really convince us. Every natural wonder there cost admission, and in my opinion, that's unjustifiably much. In addition, the whole city smelled like sulfur (which is of course part of Rotorua, but still clouded our memories of it).

There were only overpriced campsites, and only one free one with three parking spaces. That's why we did something really unsocial and parked the car there at noon and then walked into town. We were able to pick up Celina's cell phone, which her parents had sent her by mail, and she became an aunt for the fourth time while we were on the way in the traffic chaos of Rotorua and heard "Impossible" on the radio. The things you could see in Rotorua weren't worth the money, so we went to the cinema and saw a terribly bad movie called Last Christmas. That wasn't necessarily a good investment either.

The next morning, a bus stopped in the parking lot where we were sleeping. About 40 chattering children got off and stood right next to our car on the way to church, just a few centimeters away. We lay there frozen because you could clearly see from the outside how we were lying there in our pajamas, and we had stupidly left the door open because it was so warm. These are the moments when we felt pretty poor because we lived in the car.

The next stop was Wai-O-Tapu. Since there were no campsites there, we slept behind a village tavern where we could camp and use the showers and toilets. It was really cool, the mood was funny, and we could have a cheap dinner there. We thought Wai-O-Tapu was worth a visit. It was a very impressive park where we could spend about four hours.

Afterwards, we went directly to Taupo, a beautiful small town right on New Zealand's largest lake, Lake Taupo. When we arrived there, we were surprised and jumped out at a lookout point. We couldn't really imagine anything about Taupo, but then we found out that this town was a vacation resort and you could see Tongariro and the snow-covered mountain next to it across the lake.

In Taupo, we spent one night at a nice campground. While we were sitting there in the common room to charge our phones, we talked to a man about our parents' age who was traveling through New Zealand on motorcycles with his wife. They had just come from Tongariro and he told Celina about it and gave her tips. Later he came back and gave us his thick book with road maps of every part of the North Island of New Zealand, on which he had traced the routes they had traveled. They had basically seen every spot on the North Island, and from then on, we also entered our routes there.

The next day, we stayed at a free hippie campground near Huka Falls in the middle of nowhere. In the evening, I suddenly realized that we had forgotten Celina's lunch box with freshly cut bread on the campground in the morning. By the way, that was supposed to be our dinner. "No problem," Celina said as she searched the trunk. "We still have these rolls" - which for some reason we didn't buy after all. As we pitifully divided the last 100 milliliters of milk into our cereal bowls, a man appeared behind us and handed us a bottle.

To get to Huka Falls the next day, we had to walk unusually far because the road was simply closed. We walked a few meters behind Danish vacationers and followed them even when the confusing signs led them through the gardens of a hotel complex. Of course, we had to follow them again when we ended up in a dead end and had to find the official way back on the main road.

Then we drove out of Taupo and spent a night directly by the lake, where it rained heavily and I sank to my ankles in a puddle when I went to the toilet in the dark. Then we set off for Turangi, the last real place before Tongariro National Park, to do our big shopping for the next few days.

-> To be continued