South Waikato District

The planned morning walk was once again squandered by rain 😠we had actually decided to just brace the elements but then a car with two dodgy looking fellows turned up a couple of times in the space of half an hour and we decided it wise not to leave the car.

So we headed off instead towards Rotorua. It was a bit of a longer drive than usual and we stopped half way for lunch where we decided to take a detour to a river that the Lord of the Rings location guide said was beautiful (despite it not actually being used as a location). We chose the shorter walk so we could still get to Rotorua and started o. The Waitamo River and Blue Springs walk. It started as just some lovely hills and golden green grasses with the sound of birds in the grass and wind through the trees from the top of the hills. In didn't take long before we saw why this place was called the Blue Springs and why it was a recommended walk. To the left the river came into view. Not very wide and not very fast flowing, just a calm stream of water running gently through the valley. The river is apparently deceptively deep but the clear water means you can see all the way to the bottom and this clarity is what gives it the wonderfully turquoise blue colour. It is so surreal and I have never seen anything like it. With the bright green leafy reeds that wave in in the currents beneath the water, attached to the rocks along the riverbed it just looks like a little paradise.
We carried along the route and within another 20 minutes of following this beautiful river we came to the spring. It was on the other side and was almost a small cove along the edge of the river that was backed by a large hill and surrounded by palms, making it look like a miniature tropical cove. Here there was a ring of even deeper blue water where the spring was fuelling the river with water that had taken up to 100 years to get here, explaining the purity. The pictures on here don't quite do it justice... the extremely vivid green one may look super green but the blue colour in the photo is exactly how it looked!
Fantail birds flitted amongst the branches here and they are becoming my favourite birds the way they dart about in the air and leap from branch to branch... never still enough for a picture!

After a while here just enjoying the view we headed on to do a bit more of the walk before heading back to the car for some food....I was so hungry!

After this was the drive to Rotorua and to find a fuse for the broken in car charger. No phone was not proving to be very fun. Not much to say for the rest of this day. It rained a lot, we went to many shops before buying another charger for the phone and then decided to have a Pizza Hut for tea before finally being able to find the camp we had previously saved on the phone.

Lovely camp... great facilities and as it was raining we had a couple of games of pool and watched some actual TV before bed :)Read more