We are now in Rotorua, New Zealand!

Dancing this past weekend was absolutely fantastic - I met so many great people, and had tons of awesome dances, and I even learned a bit at the classes. The dance camp was at this little out of the way place in the middle of nowhere - when you opened the front door of the main building, the sheep baa'ed at you! ^_^ Made me crack up every time I heard it.



I hooked up with some other dancers who were doing some traveling, so the five of us have been exploring the north island. We were in Hamilton on Monday afternoon and yesterday morning, where we went to see the Hamilton Gardens. A little while south of there is Waitomo, which is a huge tourist attraction because of the glow worm caves. We did a caving tour Tuesday morning, where we had to suit up in wetsuits and explore about 1km of caves (which took us about 3 hours!). It was really cool (and cold!) because we got to do some swimming, some climbing, some crawling, and in the middle of it, we stopped at the "Hard Rock Cafe" where they fed us some hot lemonade and chocolate fish (a marshmallow candy bar coated in chocolate in the shape of a fish!)



Oren and Kitty had to leave Rotorua this morning to go back to Auckland to catch their flight, but Alicja, Dave and I hung around a while. Alicja had already spent two weeks touring around the south island, but Dave and I haven't, so it was here where we decided to part ways.

Our original goal was for Dave and I to hire a car and drive all the way down to Wellington, stopping to do the Tongariro Crossing. But then we found our that no one would rent out a car to us (because it would have been a one way rental). And then to top it off, we found out the the crossing was closed! And would be closed for the next coupla days! Oh noes!

Well, there went that idea, so instead we hopped on a plane within an hour and a half and were on our way to Christchurch! We arrived in Christchurch about 5pm, and hung around in the city for a bit until we went dancing! Yay for swing dancing in Christchurch! The scene here is pretty good, and the people are really nice. Chrissy hosted us for the night after the dance, and when we got back to her place, we were super tired, so we crashed almost right away!