Taupo

Hello everyone! The bus picked me up from Rotorua and I left the land of the smelly sulphur to head to Lake Taupo. It was (is) the second biggest super volcano in the world after Yellowstone National park and erupted about 2000 years ago. Apparently there were orange clouds in Rome for 3 weeks. It left a massive lake larger than Singapore which has amazing trout fishing apparently.

So I decided to do a skydive there! Its NZ's cheapest and I was told jump as soon as you get the opportunity, the weather changes to much. As it was a gorgeous day me and 9 others decided to do it. We got DVDs to where our instructor had a camera strapped to his hand. my guy was really nice made me feel really calm. So we get in this little pink plane, 5 of us strapped to 5 med and after some very thorough safety checks the plane took off. I was amazed at how slowly to took is to climb to 15,000 feet, I guess small planes are slower. They gave us oxygen masks as well, just as a precaution as there was no cabin pressure system. They opened the hatch and the people in front went. I was very nervous all the way up but everyone in the plane was joking around and talking so there wasn't much time to get worked up. Just before the jump I was hanging out of the plane terrified, but they didn't hang around or say much, they just went for it so you couldn't really have to much time to think. The first 20 seconds were the scariest of my life!!! I was screaming like a banshee! But suddenly it changed and felt amazing, the view was the best I've ever seen. It was exhilarating, very cold but the rush of air past you felt amazing! The freefall lasted about 60 seconds and  at about 5,000 feet the guy pulled the parachute and suddenly I was floating in mid-air. He steered it left and right and I could really appreciate the stunning views below me. This bit lasted roughly 4 minutes before we came into land. My instructor then said he was going to stop talking to focus on the landing after teaching me the landing position and we zig-zaged down to the landing strip. I glided to earth and seriously, the rush was so cool!!!

We then found out that due to the weather the Tongariro crossing was cancelled. So we slept in and got to National park at about 12:30. It was snowing!! SNOWING!! its only very early Autumn here and if we had snow t 780m above sea level then the Crossing at 2,000 would have been much worse. This hostel is amazing though, best I've stayed at. The rooms are hotel standard, the food is amazing and the bar looks pretty good as well. There is also a hot tub, so a soak in the tub in the snow seems like a good idea this afternoon. After we got here we went and had a snowball fight then walked to the place where they filmed Golum's pool, the place where he gets in the forbidden pool and Faramir wants to kill him. It was a very nice photo and I'm allowed to out it on Facebook! I'm not going to hang around and do the crossing, who knows when the weather will be good again I'm staying with friends which is free! So that will be the end of my adventures till next Wednesday when I get to finally cross over to the south island, so I'll keep you updated about that later!