Day 6/7 - River Valley

After a windy trip on the bus and a fairly uneventful drive from Taupo we arrived at our first unique accommodation spot in a place called River Valley. It’s unique mainly because it is smack bang in the middle of no-where, it’s a great example of an adventure lodge and it’s beds are huge. The bunks sleep up to 6 people, on one bunk! We had our little group of Phil, Erin Katherine, Dan Holly and myself and we occupied one of them. It was pretty spacious though and each person had a single bed space of room, minus Phil and Erin who shared one. We also jumped into the spa and sauna as a reward for our hard efforts put in on the mountain walk. We also jumped in the solar heated river that ran past the hostel to cool off. That night we relaxed in the lounge area and mingled some more with the other travellers before retiring to our enormous bed.
The next morning we relaxed a little and took a walk up the opposite mountain to see if we could find another area that was used for filming for the Lord of The Rings. It’s an area of the river that was used I think in the first movie. The river is used for grade 5 rafting and is famous in New Zealand for being the best rafting river. We hiked up the steep hill and admired the view before setting off to try and find this elusive area of the river. We had to hike through the small forest at the top but decided we’d run our of time if we’d wanted to go where we had planned. So we hope to go back to River Valley on the way home to see more of the scenery.
After our hike we hopped on the bus to Wellington. I cannot get over the scenery in New Zealand. It is awesome. Very similar to BC and Wales but still very different. We have not seen a lot of sheep though, mostly cows, maybe we will see more sheep as we head down to the South Island. When we arrived in Wellington we found out that Prince William is also spend some time there and was caught on a date with a Wellington girl. We didn’t run into him though. We only spent an evening there so we really missed out on a lot of free things to take a look at there. It will be another place to spend an extra day.

Holly and David