Rotorua, North Island

I saw Mt Doom yesterday!

But now we're in Rotorua and it’s been raining alllll day. Poopy.

Wellington ended up being okay, the city has a lot of potential but our timing with being there just seemed a little off. It was orientation week for the first year uni students, so the place was just crawling with 18year olds. And not just at night either, we saw groups of them doing a scavenger hunt of the CBD during breakfast one day we were there. I also made the mistake of not running until late into our second day there and ended up discovering the beaches and Oriental Bay and amazing view of the city a little too late to be able to come back and enjoy it. Yesterday we took a long ass bus ride from Wellington to Rotorua. The changing landscape was great though, I was in the Shire and Gondor and saw Mt Doom in a matter of hours! And we had another great Kiwi bus driver with lively commentary.
When we got here, to Rotorua (inland but on Lake Rototua, and is known for all the Geo-thermal activity in the area), the party in the bar next to the hostel was bumping, and it wasn’t even 8pm. I went on an unsuccessful goon mission and then we headed over to check it our anyways. It was an interesting mix of people to say the least.
This morning I got up and ran along the lake front, it was so foggy it looked like an ocean because you couldn't see the other side, past Sulfur Bay and then back through town. Sulfur Bay smells like rotten eggs, actually most of the town does, haha
Since it hadn’t stopped raining I decided to bypass some of the other geo-thermal features until tomorrow morning (fingers crossed that it’s nice!) before the last leg of our New Zealand journey- the bus to Auckland!