Grace's "There and Back Again" DAY 5

It was a VERY warm morning! We had camped at the car park by the Aranui cave. The van proves to be really good for freedom-camping so far, with the newly improved bed frames, the kitchen cabinet and the fold-out table. The sisters (Hannah and Grace) were definitely having the best time of their lives, and it showed REALLY clearly with their bickering at each other until the late hours of the night :P .... and I trying to block them out so that I can catch a good night sleep.... (editor's note: Sonny obviously does not understand sisterly love...that bickering was expressions of the highest affection!)

Hannah and Grace would be going on the Waitomo cave tour. Although we had seen glow worms the night before on the free trail walk, we decided it would be a different experience for Grace. I decided to stay back in the van because my exacts words - "you seen one glow worm, you seen all glow worms!" How different can they be!..:) " Therefore only Hannah and Grace went for their tour which consisted 2 caves - the disney-like glow worm cave tour, which according to them featured a hilarious hand-signalling-slow-talking guide, and the Aranui cave. The reason they decided to go with the usually scorned huge operator was a time crunch - they were the only operators offering tours at 9 am. We  wanted to show Grace the glowworms, but also to get back on the road asap to head down to Mt Taranaki. While the big huge glowworm cave was a little cheesy with tiled flooring and an overly enthusiastic gesticulating guide, the boat ride at the end in complete silence under glow worm filled "skies" was pretty amazing. For an additional twist, the tour culminates in riding the boat all the way out of the cave on a little river, which is how the original discovering Maoris entered. They were NOT impressed however, with the infinitely cheesy photo pack the gift shop tried to sell them, consisting of a single green screen photo of them imposed on various scenes within the car. Grace literally laughed in the woman's face when she saw how terribly done it was. The second cave was much cooler, full of really amazing formations and with a much smaller crowd. While they were enjoying themselves, I was enjoying a beer, the left-over Nandos chicken in the comfort of the van, while watching people in the car park.

After their tour, we visited two other places nearby. Hannah and I had never visited these place before so we thought it is a good idea to see them - the Mangapohue Natural Bridge and Marokopa Falls. Along the winding road, we (unfortunately) bumped into these two fat, loud, show-off women (TWICE!) in their overly large, gas-wasting Hummer. One of them was changing in their car as well (according to Hannah)...thanks God I did not witness that :P .. As we were walking on the trail, Grace developed a persistent hiccup that just wouldn't go away. Hannah reminded me that I used to scare the soul out of her in order to cure her hiccup (Well... I cannot take credit for the method. I learned it on Google :P ). And guess what!- It worked on Grace as well!...She also got her soul scared out of her, but it cured her hiccups.

 

After the walk, a quick lunch, we started driving along the west coast towards Tongariro. Along the way, we saw Mount Taranaki (which Hannah said we are going to climb it someday!) and Grace got to soak her feet in the Tasman Sea. Hannah suggested that we took the Forgotten Highway. It was a very scenic road which very few cars, but it turned out to be much, much, much longer than we expected! We had to drive through the mountains, up and down those steep slopes along this GOD-FORGOTTEN-NOT-A-SINGLE-SOUL-IS-PRESENT highway, and by the end we were VERY LOW on gas!

Someone up there must be watching us! We passed by several towns, but these towns consisted of only a few houses, and there were no gas stations! The van slowly, and I mean very slowly crawl its way up and down the hills, and with all our cheering and encouragement, we made it to the first town that has a gas station - Taumarunui! Pheewww...... after we got a full tank of gas, we drove on trying to get as close as possible to Tongariro because the plan for tomorrow is to do the Tongariro crossing. We spent the night at DOC campsite in the shadows of Mount Ruapehu.