Mt Ruapehu

First I'd like to say sorry that I didn't tell you who was writing on the post before this.

It's Becca, one of the kids in room 14.

Anyway, on Saturday we left Rotorua and went to Mt Ruapehu. For about an hour what I saw out the window was either pine/temperate forest and/or meadows/towns, then as we went up the mountain it was cold scrublands (tussock grass and other small plants) which finally turned into snowy rocks. Now, this was the first time I had EVER seen snow, so I want you to imagine it. Imagine the first time you saw snow, and how excited you were. Now imagine how excited you would have been if you had been hearing about how awesome the snow was for about 5 years and not seen it at all until now. Now you know how I felt. I'm 10 now. I was also ten when I saw it.

We were planning to stay there for 2 hours. That was until we discovered that it was 2 degrees outside with 80 kilometer-an-hour winds. Because of that, we stayed for about 2 seconds! We put on warm clothes, crossed the road, picked up a chunk of ice, chucked it in the chilly-bin, and got back in the car! We did stop to look at some icicles on the way down though, and they were really cool.

The picture shows me and my mum by the icicles, and the mountain from the southern side.

Whakarewarewa

On Friday the 19th, I was not at school. I was about 457 kilometers away, in Rotorua, by the time everyone else was sitting around eating lunch. To be exact, I was in Whakarewarewa village. (It is pronouced faka-rae-wa-rae-wa. You can visit their website here.) This village is surrounded by geysers and steam vents, as well as boiling hotpools. The photos show a meeting house through the steam, and a place where the ground is falling away because of the steam. The surface temperature on some of the hotpools is about 200 degrees celcius! THAT IS HOT!!!! The deeper down in the pool you get, the hotter it is. People live in the village too, and they use some of the pools for cooking stuff like sweetcorn in little netted bags held up by a string tied to a rock. They also have put little boxes with lids over some of the steam vents so they can cook their dinner. You can walk all the way around the village and see all the hot pools. You can actually move into the village if you are from the same bloodline as the people living there, but I recommend you don't, not because the people there aren't nice, but because it smells like rotten eggs! Despite the smell, I think it would be really cool to live there! The people are really nice and all from the same bloodline, but there are 26 different families living there. I'll tell you more about the rest of my holiday in later posts (like maybe tomorrow!)

Ice Strikes Summerland!

These past few days its been really cold in the mornings in New Zealand... but Summerland don't care they just have fun on the ice. One morning it got so cold Campbell, Mohsin, Josh and Adam went on the field because it got covered with ice.

Did you know at midnight it was -2 degrees celcius! And this is what we did..

By Campbell, Mohsin, Josh and Adam on ice!!!

NB: Mr Hall is aware that the voice on the video may sound like his. Of course this isn't possible. He would never support such jersey wrecking hijinks.