A detox - New Zealand-style!

With Australia and South East Asia being quite heavy on the old liver we decided to spend our first week in New Zealand catching up on sleep, detoxing, and giving our livers a much needed break! To be honest, we were both absolutely exhausted and needed a good few days taking it easy.
We spent our first couple of nights in Auckland to give us time to book the Kiwi Experience for the south island and also look into flights for Fiji. We were advised to get out of Auckland as soon as possible as it really wasn't that good compared to some of the other places in New Zealand. I definitely agree with that advice. On our first day, we walked round the city and I felt like I could be walking round Leeds city centre, only the shops and restaurants are not as nice as they are in Leeds. I don't know what expectations I had of Auckland but it wasn't that!

We were happy to leave Auckland for Rotorua a couple of days later, and although it was only four hours further south it was so much more beautiful. That is one thing you can't knock about New Zealand, the scenery is phenomenal.
Rotorua is famous for its thermal spas and mud baths, and since we were detoxing, we thought it'd be rude not to try them out!

After a very early night and good nights sleep we were up early the next morning to visit Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland, which is basically a group of craters and volcanoes. The area is famous for its geothermal activity - geysers, hot pools, and boiling mud, which you get to see all three at Wai-O-Tapu. It absolutely stank of rotten eggs but there were also some lovely lakes, which we had a nice walk around.

It was absolutely freezing outside so the walk was nice just to warm us both up! It is well worth a visit and is just half an hour on a bus from Rotorua town.

After a nice morning walk at Wai-O-Tapu, we spent the afternoon at the Polynesian Spa, relaxing in hot alkaline and acid pools. Alkaline is good for your skin and acid is good for aches and pains.

It was lovely to relax and it hopefully undid some of the knots from carrying our backpacks around (which are getting heavier by the day!) The pools were between 38 and 42 degrees but they were all outside so we heated up and cooled down quite fast. The pools also overlooked Lake Rotorua which was very nice and can imagine it would be very romantic at sunset! It would have been lovely to top the afternoon off with a massage, but at $80 for just half an hour, it was way over my backpacking budget..... I really miss those four quid Thai massages!

We left early the following morning to spend three nights in New Zealand's capital, Wellington. It was a long 10 hour bus journey to get there, but as the scenery was so beautiful, it didn't seem too bad. I tried my best not to fall asleep so I would actually see the gorgeous scenery and snow covered mountains. I managed to get some pictures of Hooker Falls and also the volcanoes where they filmed the fight scenes for Lord of the Rings, but as the bus didn't stop a great deal, many of the pictures had to be taken from the bus window.

We arrived in Wellington and immediately thought it was so much nicer than Auckland. Although we didn't do many of the tourist activities in Wellington, there just seems to be so much more going on than Auckland, including lots of museums in and around the city, nice bars and restaurants, wine tasting tours, and a safari to spot lots of seals along the coast.
We had quite an uneventful few days in Wellington, which suited us as we were still feeling pretty shattered, although I do wish we had done the seal coast safari. From what I remember though it was pretty expensive. On our second evening there we went for a lovely Indian meal and a few drinks to celebrate our detox.....

On our last night in Wellington we actually went to the cinema to see the new Daniel Craig film, Defiance, which is a fantastic movie. We were leaving Wellington on the Kiwi bus early the next morning to catch the ferry to the south island, so it was another early night for us. Our week of detoxing seems to have gone quite well!