Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

After three days in a motel it was off to Rotorua for some more camping. Somehow our gear had expanded further making the car seem more packed than ever. Despite this we all squeezed in and headed off. We stopped off at a free to view boiling mud pool on the way. On the spur of the moment we also stopped off at the Waimangu Volcanic Valley. It’s claim to fame was having the world’s largest boiling lake. Having seen the second largest in Dominica we’d always felt we should see the largest. Having seen both the Dominica lake was better although the walk through the Waimangu Valley was worth the time spent.

Reaching Rotorua we looked at three separate campsites before settling on the first one we found closest to town.

In the evening we walked into town which seemed dead at that time and ate at Hell’s Pizza. They were tasty but one was insanely hot.

Saturday turned out to have great weather – blues skies, a few small puffy clouds, low humidity and certainly warm. This set the stage for a rather fun day.

Mid morning, Helen, Sam and I went out for a walk along the Waikato River. Ben chose to stay behind and focus on his job search. We parked the car at the end of County Avenue only to discover I’d left the camera battery back in the charger. Oops. Not wanting to lose the chance to capture pics I quickly returned and picked it up.

Even though the walk was just outside of town, we could easily have been far out in the country as there were very few buildings along the way. The river was unlike any we’ve seen before. The water was crystal clear with little sediment obscuring the rocky river bed. This must be due to the fact that the river is fed by Lake Taupo where all the sediments have had time to settle out coupled with a fast flow scouring the river bed clean.

Right at the point where our trail met the river there was a fast flowing and very hot spring where folks were bathing. This would have been a better option than the paid for private baths us boys took a few days earlier. But we didn’t know then.

Sam was cameraman again and again we have lots of good photos for the blog. Most you’ll see in the slideshow at the end. We saw few people on this walk which made it very pleasant.

The trail we were on took us just under an hour to follow and reach Huka Falls. Here the fast flowing river churned through a narrow cut in the rocks finally spilling out into the next section of the river. On the other side of the river was a car park and hence the area was quite crowded with tourists.

We ate our lunch here before returning the way we had come.

We had thought about visiting a nearby volcanic area but figured we did not have enough time to do it justice before our next planned adventure.

Something we’d said we’d do with the boys before we left on this trip was to do a tandem skydive. We’d never got round to it but here in Taupo they have a very professional outfit. And the weather was great. And they have slots available. It was hard to resist the opportunity. All day, the boys (including me) had been quite excited. Not so Helen. She’d had a bad dream about it the night before and had been deliberating all day. Finally she felt she had to pass on the trip and did not even feel comfortable coming along to watch.

At 3pm the three of us were picked up and taken to the airport on the outside of town.

The jump we had booked was from 15,000ft allowing us a minute of free fall. Being a tandem jump it meant that we had an experienced instructor strapped to our backs who handled all the business end of the skydive. That meant the training was brief and focused on the few things we needed to remember to do.

It was around 5pm that we finally took off all squashed into the airplane. There were three other tandem skydivers in the plane. Two of them had paid the vast extras to be filmed by a separate cameraman so the plane was full. By the time we reached our exit altitude we were way above the clouds and had an excellent view of the whole lake. One by one we left the plane and entered the cold rushing air for our minute of free fall descent. This is not my first skydive so I’ll leave it to Ben and Sam to use their words to describe the experience. The parachutes were deployed at around 5,000 feet giving us 4-5 minutes under canopy which added to the ride.

Back on the ground we had a final group video shot involving some silliness. Faces all round were smeared with grins. We then settled down for the jump video to be prepped and shown to us. The two jumpers who’d paid for a cameraman to go with them featured in the video but there were enough shots of all of us to warrant our buying a copy of the video which, courtesy of YouTube, you can now watch for yourself.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoP-K8ZMvtw[/youtube]

Comments from Ben :

The tandem skydive was great fun. The build up to the jump while in the plane was great and the views were awesome. The fall itself was phenomenal. The winds were huge and the feeling unforgettable. It was really nice to have a true birds-eye view on the world.

However, the tandem aspect made it feel more of an extreme ride versus me jumping out of a plane. I now have an itch to learn the ropes and make the plunge solo and I think that will be an even greater thrill.

Comments from Sam :

Falling 10,000ft was as much fun as it sounds. For 50-60 seconds I was spinning through the thin air overlooking beautiful scenery, while not being able to hear my own screams over the sound of air rushing against me. Unfortunately it was over too soon, and I want to do it again.

We polished off the evening with a damn fine curry and a damn lousy movie.

Yesterday was largely a rest day following our exertions of the previous day. The morning was spent reading/blogging and generally resting. In the afternoon we drove to nearby Lake Rotopounama for the 5km circumferential walk. It was very pretty. Sam was cameraman and took loads of pictures which I still need to sort through.

After this we headed over to the small town of Turangi to visit the hot pools there. We saw some hot pools and bubbling mud – a small taster for what we hope to see in Rotorua. Ben, Sam and I took a dip in the 40C private pools.

After that it was supermarket time and a bite to eat.

Ben and I spent the evening solving 4 more Euler Problems making my total answered 64. They’re definitely getting harder and take more ingenuity to solve.

I also ran into some computer problems. The trial version of McAfee ran out so I removed it. I subsequently had rampant outbound network traffic using up all my paid for and limited internet bandwidth. I spent a while trying to nail this but I’m not yet sure this is sorted. This will limit the number of photos I can upload before leaving here.

We will be moving on to Taupo this morning. Problem is is that it’s pissing down with rain. That will make things fun.