Thursday, May 11, 2017

Squires Down Under - New Zealand Day 4

Day 11 - Rotorua to Auckland - November 22, 2017

It's typically around a 3 hour drive from Rotorua to Auckland.  Our drive was quite a bit longer because we made some detours to a couple of things that we wanted to see.


A couple of hours from Rotorua are the Waitomo Glowworm Caves.  There are two areas of the cave. The first area was a large cavernous cave that we walked around in and looked at the different stalactites and stalagmites.


After that we boarded a boat with the rest of our group and rode in the dark to the area of the cave with the glowworms.  It was stunning.  Everything was silent and perfectly dark, except for the sparkle of the glowworm stars on the cave ceiling above.


These pictures are at the exit of the cave.

Our tour guide guided the boat by pulling the boat through the water on ropes above, so there wasn't even the noise from oars or sloshing water.


The exit to the cave.  The white circle to the left of Ada's head is the head of the tour guide on the boat that was behind ours.



I don't have a camera that was capable of taking photos inside the cave, so here is a processed photo of the glowworms that I found online.  It was a really cool place.


Back on our trek to Auckland we swung by the beautiful Hamilton Temple.



We rested a bit before continuing our journey.




Auckland, like Sydney, has a Sky Tower right in the city.  Another fantastically lovely city.





Lying down on the glass floor.



Aukland's Harbor Bridge.


This might be the last time that they've hugged each other.



We forget that Christmas is near here in the Southern Hemisphere.  They're just gearing up for summer!



We ate at a decent Mexican restaurant (I love that we can find Mexican food all over), but the girl taking our order was not a native New Zealander and did not speak very good English.  Somehow we ended up with a bunch of adult quesadillas and I just didn't want to deal with it, so I ate them...

Tomorrow will literally be the longest day of our lives.

No comments: