3rd -> 5th September (Taupo)

It was a lucky morning for me: I'd set my watch alarm to go off at 6.30 for the 7:30 bus, giving me an hour. Lovely. But my watch alarm is the most useless alarm ever made. You know that noise you make when you hold a sneeze in... sort of sounds like a big bug being squished... that's louder. So unsurprisingly I rolled over, casually looking at my watch at 7:15 and swore loudly. I caught the bus though. Clever me knew my alarm would probably fail it's purpose so I'd packed the night before. "Taupo here I come" I thought. I was really excited to be going there, I'd heard a lot of things about the place and they all gave great promise. Fishing (lots and lots), prawn fishing, kayaking, bungy, waterfalls and jetboating; it all looked great. And I had a whole day to enjoy it when I got there.

You remember what I said about Franz Joseph? Well Taupo is a lot bigger, it has around 40 streets instead of one, but it has the same population. It was impossible to find people! The shops opened ten or eleven in the morning and shut around 5ish; they usually had a siesta during lunch, leaving you with an hours in the morning and another in the afternoon to get stuff done. And the hostels were even worse: there were 4 people in my hostel, and two of them worked there. The Base Backpackers opposite us was packed out with school kids on a trip and that was it. I went to the i-site to try fishing but none of the boats were going out fishing due to lack of demand, unless I wanted to pay $300 to hire the whole boat for a few hours. Finally I managed to find some one, a German girl, and we headed on a kayaking tour. Unsurprisingly we were the only people going. The next day I decided to relax and have some more me time, so I went prawn fishing. It was a nice place set up in a prawn farm/restaurant and you fished for the day catching as many as you wanted. They even cooked your prawns for you at the end of the day. I took a few beers and a book and got settled in. Three and a half hours later it was closing time, no prawns. A group of Chinese guys had two buckets full, but I had none. It's not in my blood, clearly.

After the first couple of days Taupo got better. A bus load of backpackers turned up and finally I had some company. There was a beautiful long walk you could take to see a raging waterfall and a beehive with free fudge and honey tasting, so i did that, and finished the day with a very rude stand up comedy show in the evening. For the record, people are still quite sensitive about Michael Jackson. Those jokes didn't go down too well, tumbleweed style. On my last day me and a guy I'd been hanging out with for a while headed off to a natural hot spring and sat there for the morning, basking in the sun, every now and then getting up to swim in the ice-cold river. We decided to travel on together, and booked a bus to Rotarua; sulphur city.

It was a shame I didn't get to fish in Taupo, it was the main thing I wanted to do. New Zealand has some of the best fishing and game hunting in the world, and I wold love to come back and do it properly. It's going n my ever expanding to do list :)