I started the morning by doodling. I drew this great caricature of Brunnen-G, great in the sense that it wasn't, and Brunnen-G drew truly great doodles of both Darleen and me.

The Blue and Green Lakes

The Blue and Green Lakes are, intuitively, two lakes, one blue and one green. There's a rise between the lakes, off-center a bit, so you can stand on top and view both of them (they're separated by a narrow stretch of forested land) at the same time. The color difference, we were told, is usually more stark than what we saw that morning -- evidently we were there too early and the park rangers hadn't gotten around to dumping in the dye -- but we could see the difference, and it was rather intriguing.

Horse Trek

Rotorua has a great horse trek place, with trails all up the side of a grassy mountain. The five of us were fitted with helmets and horses, and away we went. It was the second time on a horse for me and the first time on a horse for Dave. Not sure about Puck, but it may have been his first time as well.

I was informed what to do to control the horse. Pull back on the reins to stop; pull on one side to turn; touch the horse with my heels to go. Eager to try these controls out on the trail, I played around a bit to see what I could do.

So I nudged the horse in the sides. Horse went ahead, following the horse in front of him. Pulled to the left. Horse went ahead, following the horse in front of him. Pulled to the right. Horse went ahead, following the horse in front of him. Pulled back. Horse went ahead, following the horse in front of him.

Having satisfactorily asserted my dominion over the animal (Buster, though it was a mare), I sat back to enjoy the ride.

The views at the top were beautiful. Once we ascended the steep parts, Leen and Brunnen-G had some chances to gallop on ahead while the rest of us poked along.

Obviously we were passing through lands where sheep and cows were grazing; there is no other kind of land in New Zealand. At one point, however, we went right by three cattle -- within just a few feet, mind you -- to pass through a gate into another field, and we realized to our horror that at least two of them were bulls.

I have never been that close to a bull before. I don't want to be that close to a bull again. In my head, I was planning out what I would do if one of them decided to kill me. My plan was, in a nutshell, to die. But we passed by the bulls without any trouble, thereby foiling Brunnen-G's fourth or fifth attempt to kill us.

Fillet

It turns out Brunnen-G pronounces "fillet" as it is spelled: "fill'-et" rather than "fill-ay'."

Food and Whakarewarewa

We got takeaways at Food for lunch, then meandered over to the Whakarewarewa Maori Village to eat it. The village IS a business: they charge money for you to go in and wander around the village, and the money is divvied up amongst the residents. The town consists of small homes, souvenir shops, hills, information plaques for tourists, and open acid and mud pits. The ground is not necessarily all that stable. Paths around the pools were positioned via no greater calculation than observing where the ground had not, by that time, opened up. I can't imagine the insurance on a house in this village. None of them had basements, of course -- many of the cottages were on stilts, raised above the ground a few inches or so.

So our Food was consumed at a picnic table, where sulphurus steam was billowing at us from one of the boiling pools. Dave kept chucking french fries at the house sparrows, who fought over them, and that prompted Leen to break up a fry or two and make sure each one got a piece. Near our table was a cooking pit, nestled above a hot pool, where someone was cooking corn on the cob.

"I can't imagine the sulphur doesn't get into the taste of the corn," I said.

"It does," Puck said, but then assured me the sulphur taste was actually quite good.

Afterward, we walked around the village, walked across a wooden foothpath that wound its way across a hot water lake, and looked at the pools of boiling mud. One of them looked like a game of Whack-A-Mole. Concentric circles marked the spots where bubbles would come out, thus creating another. Looking at all such spots at once, with bubbles come up from each one, it felt like we should be pounding them with big old spongy hammers.

The signs in the village, with information about the various geological features of the place, were wrought with misspellings, although not so bad as even this forum can be at times. Still, Brunnen-G and I cringed at careless mistakes on professionally constructed signs. Correct English didn't seem to be a problem elsewhere in the country -- it was just a problem on signs around the geothermal attractions. Maybe the sign makers had been breathing too much sulphur.

Apparently, at one time, admission into the village also provided viewing access to a geyser, but when we went the two areas had split into two separate businesses. We saw the geyser but not close up. Brunnen-G and Puck were not pleased and vowed never to take anyone to the village part again.

Ice Cream

We stopped for ice cream. Again.

Hot Food

We spotted a takeaway place that appeared to be named "Hot Food," but on closer inspection it did have a proper name.

Lake Tarawera

We went to Lake Tarawera.

East Coast Beach

We went to an east coast beach.

The Tunnel

On the way back, we stopped at a spot by a river. The river was wide but shallow, with lots of rocks breaking up the flow. The road wound around next to it, and a foot bridge crossed the river to a tunnel that sloped gently upward through a mountain. Brunnen-G and Puck had previously biked through the tunnel downhill in the dark, not having any idea if it was free of holes, steps, bumps, or other obstacles that would kill them. So we figured we'd hike up the tunnel and back again. It wouldn't take long. The tunnel was only about fifty yards long by the look of it.

So we headed off into the tunnel, and it quickly became pitch black. We could see the daylight at the other end of the tunnel, but that was pretty much it. It was a dirt floor, with mild ruts along the edges, sometimes with pools of water, but on the whole it was level ground. So we kept walking. We joked about Brunnen-G and Puck taking us here to finally do the Internet psycho thing and kill us all. But Leen stayed back in the car, as she was thoroughly exhausted, so Dave and I speculated about how they'd do her in after they dispatched us. And we kept walking.

It dawned on us that the light at the end of that tunnel wasn't really getting any bigger. Worse, the light at the end behind us was still significantly larger than the light at the far end. This tunnel, which looked -- and still looked -- to be about fifty yards long turned out to be nearly a mile (1.6 kilometers) long. It took us FOREVER to get to the other end. In the meantime, we noticed that there were glow worms on the roof of the tunnel. I found what might have been the big dipper, except that that constellation isn't visible from the southern hemisphere.

The other side had an upstream segment of the river and an upstream segment of the road. Both wound way around the mountain. A tourist plaque told all about the tunnel and its history, except it didn't tell us the one thing we wanted to know, namely its length. Puck and I jogged the entire way back, completing the trip in something on the order of 10-12 minutes, and that's what we used to make an extremely rough guess about the tunnel's length. I hadn't done any prolonged exercise like that in eons; I'm glad it was (slightly) downhill in that direction. Dave and Brunnen-G walked back, which gave me a chance to recover before we headed back to the car.

The Drive Home

On the drive home, we were pretty tired, so we rested and made faces at Brunnen-G from the backseat. We passed a deer farm, which is a bit of a culture shock. We don't really have deer farms in the United States -- deer are wild here. But there aren't really any big wild animals in New Zealand. The deer they have are raised on farms for their meat.

We passed a number of little tiny towns on the way back to Auckland -- the kind that consist of maybe three homes and nothing more. Some of the places were remnants of towns built during a gold rush they had way back.

The towns got bigger as we neared Auckland. One was called "Te Puke." Never mind that it was pronounced "Te Pookee," or some such; when you pass a billboard that urges, "Stop and Taste Te Puke," sometimes there is just no way to keep proper pronunciation in mind.

Thunderbirds

We stayed up late for fun that night and, among other things, watched an episode of Thunderbirds entitled, "Attack of the Alligators!" which was automatically good, because any title that ends in an exclamation mark has to be good. Indeed it was; it was the best episode we saw the whole time. It involved genetic experiments in the South American jungle. Real lizards were filmed in conjunction with the puppets. The story involved chemicals leaking into the river, which, when consumed by the alligators, made them humongous. So giant alligators were chasing puppets all over the place, and International Rescue had to be called in. The laughs in this episode are too many to count and impossible to describe.

Birds

3 new, 15 total: Black Swan, Fan Tail, House Sparrow, Australasian Harrier, Mallard, Greenfinch (*), Australian Magpie, Red-Billed Gull, Black-Billed Gull, White-Fronted Tern, Myna, Little Black Shag (*), Welcome Swallow, Pukeko, New Zealand Falcon (*)(!).