Up at 7, showered, packed and headed off at 8 just up the road to the hot springs of Spa Park. It's very pleasant, it has to be said, sat with hot water pouring over you -- like a bath being tipped over constantly -- at 8.15am. Like last night a draggle of others appear and enjoy the free spa. We have to be off, though, as we're booked in up the road for some quad biking. [One thing about the free spa water the cool river water that flows around your feet and sometimes within a few centimetres of the surface -- brrr! ]
Back to the guest house where we have our only silence protocol breakdown re: the bathroom. On checkout the woman asks where I'm from. Hmm. She's the second not to think we're British. She has us down for Kiwis or Aussies. A bit of panic looking for petrol -- time's running out and it's hard to remember where the petrol stations are.
At the quad biking place there are a couple of photos of one and two day trips which look fun, we're just here for the two hour Explorer. The bikes are pretty straightforward, automatic clutch with a foot operated gear lever and a thumb throttle which is easy to use. All you really have to do is slow down for corners -- if in doubt just slam it down, to first if necessary -- and the bike will crawl down hills, almost stalling.
We start off on a little loop getting used to the bikes, somehow I end up behind the lead bloke, where experienced riders go. Not that I know what I'm doing but the guide hares off leaving me an open road. No-one seems to keep up. The track for these short sessions is around over and across the adjacent hills through thick vegetation so a lot of the time both hands and face are being whacked by ferns (rule 4: don't hit the trees, they hurt) with a visual appearance of travelling through a triangle [between ground and vegetation either side]. It's good fun and the time flew by. During one of the stops to let the others catch up the blokey thought I was an Aussie. Hmm. He did say his website mentioned the day trips but the leaflets didn't. He was going to fix that. 
We headed over the road to a thermal reserve but were beaten back by the NZ$ 19 each entrance fee (the NZ$ 160 we'd just spent on the quad bikes had sort of blown the budget). So we tootled down the road and turned into the next thermal reserve. This was NZ$ 16.50 each but the board outside listed twenty-odd attractions so we went in.
Wai-o-tapu turned out to be the place that Helen had wanted to see but clearly had no idea where it was or what its name was. It's a good place to waste some time and film on steamy, bubbly, coloured things. Which we did. The only problem was that we didn't see the advertised Lady Knox Geyser - erupts at 10.15am (how odd is that?) -- nor the bubbling mud. The mud is a freebie up the road and the geyser, they only gave us a ticket to it when we asked about it and it remains unsignposted until fifteen minutes before it's due to go. How odd. The mud pools are amusing though irritatingly hard to predict should you want to retain a permanent memory.
As a space filler, en route to Rotorua, we went to see the blue and green lakes and missed every single turn-off for them bar the one where the road terminates at Lake Tarawera. The blue and green lakes are identifiable as such from the air [rather than where we were] -- their relative depth changes how much light is reflected.
Our hostel is the Funky Green Voyager which is a brand new set up [the buildings, anyway] where we have top billing in the en-suite room. The blokey has a discussion with us about African Tour companies, dismissing our suggestion that Drifters was a large company [he'd not heard of it]. Funnily, we'd had a long conversation with the second guide on the quad bikes who'd worked as a safari guide in Malawi. Being from Essex [Exmoor, Helen tells me] I think she, at least, recognised us as Brits.
Helen had a shower and consumed all the hot water and I forced her to remove all of my head hair over 3mm [long]. Hmm, I have a funny shaped head...
Despite an executive decision to move the quad bikes' NZ$ 160 out of the daily budget (NZ$ 140) and into the exceptional items column (to be funded by an as yet undisclosed means) we've still spent the entire day's budget already. To keep things within reason we opt for McDonalds. We would have tried the local "Sizzler" but, as with so many places, there was no external indication of prices. I'm not one for entering a restaurant, reading the menu, baulking at the prices and embarrassedly walking out. I like to do that outside, without the benefit of the staff watching me at close quaters.
Rotorua McDonalds has a McCafe from which I was tempted by a post McChicken Combo ([combo is] foreign for meal) coffee and one of the non-UK giant muffins. What is the excuse in Britain for having teechy muffins? You want a muffin that dominates your plate and preferably the next plate too. That's another thing, they like to serve a warm muffin here, with butter. No dry crumbly nonsense here. You get solid muffin that slices like cake.
There was a very good sunset on the way back but it didn't last long enough to be captured. To commiserate we opened a bottle of wine and are drinking it from my tin mug (probably its first use on the trip to date).
Funky Green Voyager, Rotorua S38.14284
E176.25085 Elev. 296m. 
(left side).
Copyright 2002 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.