Today we checked out of the hotel, packed the car and started our long journey to Rotorua. The drive is supposed to take close to six hours but we always allow much longer than that so we can stop along the way as we need to.
One of Tom’s friends recommended a stop along this route to a small place that supposedly sells cheese ice cream! I have never had cheese ice cream and it sounded pretty interesting so we decided to navigate there.
It was actually fairly hard to find, there wasn’t much signage and we had to take some fairly barren looking roads to get there even though it was supposed to be right off the highway. We eventually found a place that looked like they sold ice cream. They had a few flavours but we couldn’t any cheese flavour so we asked them but they had no idea what we were talking about! Tom verified with his friend but it turns out there was supposed to be a comma between cheese and ice cream! We had a good laugh and ordered other flavours of ice cream anyway.
We sat out the front in the fairly deserted town and ate our snacks and patting the local cat before switching drivers and continuing our journey.
Looking at the map later, there is a “Kapiti Cheeses Ice Cream” marker but I don’t think its what we thought it was!
We made a few stops along the way for lunch, etc. but we basically spent the whole day driving! Along the way to Rotorua is a place called Taupo which Anthony and Amy had been to before and spoke very highly of Taupo De Bretts, a mineral hot spring place that was more like a water park! There were small private pools, much larger public ones and even a water slide! As soon as we arrived I had barely taken my seat belt off before Amy had collected her bag and towel, yelled “bye” and was half way to counter! After driving for most of the day it was pretty nice to relax in the warm water. We stayed there for a bit over an hour before we had to go to continue to Rotorua. When we all met up again Amy broke the news that she had received a phone call from the volcano tour company and that due to severe weather the volcano tour would be cancelled!
I got a few dirty looks at this point! My history with volcanos has not been good. Two cancelled holidays to Bali, a slight detour in Japan and now this. It seems my luck is pretty bad when it comes to volcanoes.
We continued to Rotorua and finally checked into our hotel. It was fairly late by this stage but the staff there were really nice and let us fix up the bill later during our stay. They gave us a quick tour of the hotel which had its own hot spring pools. The hot water from the earth was used to heat the main swimming pool and the rooms while also being pumped into the smaller more private pools. The whole place did stink quite a bit from the sulphur, sometimes worse than others but there was no escaping it, the whole area was like this! It didn’t take us too long to adapt to the smell anyway.
By the time we got to the hotel, Amy’s friend Madi had already arrived and greeted us as we were getting shown to our rooms. Madi was down for the wedding and Anthony’s parents were due to arrive tomorrow. After dropping off our bags we all got in the car and headed down the main strip to find somewhere to eat. The town wasn’t huge, especially compared to Wellington. Once we knew where the main street was it was pretty easy to get around. There were a few options for dinner but we decided to try the saloon restaurant to finish up our day and it was pretty good. We didn’t do a whole bunch today but it was a pretty big day! After dinner we all went to bed!