Time's going very fast and, if we're to have a couple of weeks on the South Island, we don't have a lot of time to get to Wellington. There are still a load of things we want to see. So today we had a lot of drivng - a 45-minute trip east before going all the way back to the west coast to see some glow-worms, then making our way south to a big lake.

It was raining thoroughly this morning, and we debated whether or not to go out to the other thermal park, but after being accused of being 'fair-weather tourists' and assured that it was nice on an overcast day, we went. It was certainly worth it, and the rain actually paused for long enough for us to wander round for an hour with umbrellas. This park was bigger than Hell's Gate, and there were even more sulphur lakes, clouds of smelly steam and boiling, muddy water. There were lakes of weird and wonderful colours too, orange from antimony oxide, yellow from sulphur, all sorts. My favourite was a lake called the Devil's Bath, which was a thick, gloopy fluorescent yellowy green from all the sulphur.

At 10.15 everyday a geyser is made to errupt just along the road a bit, so we hurried up there just in time. It was a little disappointing that the geyser guy (see what I did there?) had to throw soap into the fumerole to get the water going (it lowers the surface tension to allow the water to spurt up), because it wasn't that natural, but the result was very cool - a jet of water spraying up about 15 feet into the air. It could last for up to an hour, but we didn't wait until the end, we had other places we had to be.

The Waitomo caves are way over in the west of the country, and are home to spectacular glow-worm colonies and are the origin of blackwater rafting (sitting in a rubber tube on a river that flows through caves, and over small waterfalls in pitch-black) which I'd even talked Mikey into doing. It started raining as soon as we got into the car, and carried on, torrentially at times, until we got to Waitomo, about three hours later. The whole place was closed, the caves were flooded, which meant we couldn't raft in them, and there were no glow-worm tours, which was very disappointing. But we decided to drive to Taupo instead, and have a look at the town there.

Two hours of driving through rain later, we arrived in Taupo. Our first choice of hostel was full, a new experience for us (they did have dormitory beds, but that's an absolutely last resort!), so we tried another place down the road. It was fine, it had a (slightly lonely-looking) parrot called Trevor, and it looked as if it'd be a very noisy place in the summer - plenty of photos on the wall of drunk lads showing various body parts, and a big sign asking people not to leave their underwear in the living room... I was quite glad they were almost empty at this time of year!

Taupo itself was a very uninteresting place with the obligatory streets of fast-food restaurants and outdoor clothing shops. We wandered through the town for a while (we'd seen everything at the cinema), stopped at an internet cafe and checked mail and Mikey put some photos onto CDs, and then went back to the hostel. It was still too early to phone home for Father's day and my dad's birthday, so we made supper. The kitchen even had CCTV cameras to make sure everyone washed up. It was a little strange.

I couldn't wait any longer, it would be almost 9am in England and everyone was bound to be up. I didn't know that no-one had got to bed until 3am... Sorry! But it was lovely to talk to everyone and chat, even if they all sounded very bleary! I suppose they could all go back to bed, if they wanted to.