Tales of Terry's Travel's: Rotorua to Auckland

Today we did our trip from the town of Rotorua to Auckland

A last picture of Rotorua Lake as we left. Our leaving the town was a bit delayed as we ended up waiting for half an hour on the bus where we were stopped for the marathon runner to pass.

Not the best picture as the bus was moving at a good clip and the window reflected the light. This is a stretch of pristine native forest. Most of New Zealand looked like this before the immigrants came from Europe

This is the picture of those endangered birds that I took a picture of yesterday. They were in the picture of the tree on our zip line trip.

We made a stop at the largest Glow worm cave in New Zealand

The forest around this entrance was thick

They had built an formal entrance.

This picture is one of theirs, as they again did not allow photography in the cave. This cave was much bigger with stalagmites and stalactites as well as some columns. The did not have the waterfalls though that the smaller, newer cave had.

This is a boat like the ones we boarded near the end of the tour, except the only light came from the glow worms themselves

This is still one of there pictures. One of the interesting things about these creatures and the human eye is that different people can see them as different colors. The first cave the we did in the South Island they looked blue to blue green to me. Today they looked white with an aura of yellow gold to me.

This is our group as we got out of our tour today. It ended as the river left the cave system.

Here is the river was I took the picture as we were leaving the tour.

Next we stopped for lunch at this small farming town. The kiwi is represented all over in this country

Their library had a very lodge feel

With these Māori statues in the park in front of the library

This is there Main Street

We wandered through this collection of signs about what New Zealand is famous for.

Our guide made sure we understood that their are three kiwi’s. The birds, the fruit, and the people

This is the Māori war dance. Our guide is Māori from the area we passed through and our staying at tonight.

They are very proud of this beautiful country they live in

New Zealand was one of the first countries to give woman the full rights in voting

The Silver Fern have been in several of the previous blogs. I have probably called it a fern tree.

If you can enlarge this picture, you will see some of the New Zealand slang

Our bus was parked near this old and still used train depot

We stopped at this memorial before we headed to our hotel for the night. He was the first prime minister of the labor party

The memorial is a lovely setting what was once a fort area with cannons that helped protect the harbor

Here is a full picture of it and the gardens surrounding it

From the hill behind the monument, I took a picture of the Auckland harbor. One third of the population of New Zealand lives in the greater Auckland area. It is a bit over 1.6 million people.