I took a look through my diary/day planner thing, after actually writing a post of course, because I’m clever, and came up with a few other thoughts.

I witnessed the greatest hitchhiking technique I’ve ever seen, demonstrated by Eben, who was probably from Israel.

I had a conversation with Eben about his travel plans (pretty vague) and mine; Happily, he agreed with my notion of trying out the hostel thing before I went overseas, and shared a pet peeve about hostel dorms, being that one guy who leaves stupidly early, and spends seventy billion hours making noise at 5am because he didn’t get organised the night before.
Eben’s thoughts boiled down to “get your stuff together the night before, and if you have to make noise, do it in the hallway”.

Of the other folk in the hostel I met, and there were many, there was the aforementioned Eben,

• a lady from Kyoto who was doing the working holiday thing,
• another lady from Estonia who’d worked the distribution & marketing side of the alcohol business, and now wanted to learn about the production side, so was WWOOFing to make that happen,
• a guy from Hiroshima who was also doing the working holiday thing, working at both the hostel and a local restaurant.
  He had … extensive travel plans. Back to Japan to check in with family, then Canada on a working holiday visa, then Europe as a tourist, then Australia as a working holidayer, then Central & South America, with an eye to not settling in Japan.
• The probably German hostel manager, or maybe evening manager, and the probably English but sounds German when she speaks the language day manager, who both extolled the virtues of Rotorua as a place to live.
  Given that they’d been here for years, if not decades, that’s kind of understandable.

The day manager also gave me some advice on the BBH Hostel listings, which was ‘stay above an 80% rating’.
Have taken this to heart.

I also bravely evicted a cockroach from the solarium/sunroom thingy one night, through the expert use of my coffee cup and a brochure.
It was a big-ass bush roach, and thus fairly friendly – It had wandered out from under the couch and was watching a German family play cards.

Leaving Taupo, I was able to stash my bag at the motel, so I wandered around the town for a while before taking the bus to Rotorua.

Ended up capturing this picture, which I’m pretty happy with;

Photographing a photographer photographing a photographer

… And this one, which just looks nice.

Then, on to Rotorua.

To be honest, I didn’t much see the point of photographing a lot of the scenic stuff in Rotorua. I’m using a cellphone camera, and it can’t capture as much as my eyes can, so the photos end up looking a bit crap.

My hostel was the Funky Green Voyager, which was a fantastic first hostel for the trip.
It’s set a very high bar, not in the least because of the profusion of comfy spaces to sprawl in while reading a book, or doing computer things. Using the kitchen was exactly as chaotic as I’d assumed it was going to be; Just making a cup of coffee required tricky timing to get through the crowd to the jug, then out again while it boiled, then back in.

Did some Big Red Couch stuff, had actual conversations with five different people, looked at the scenic wonders of Rotorua without actually spending any money on them, …, nothing spectacular, but it was kind of relaxing.
I did wander around the shoreline of the lake, where many thousands of midges wanted to be friends with my nostrils.
I also went to the Night Market, which was pretty fun; They’d closed off a couple of streets, put up those expanding stall things, had some live music. (One of whom was pretty good when he did his own stuff, but then he switched to acoustic covers of Creed songs, which … were not as good)

My one obnoxiously tourist thing was to go and ride the luge; Did this on my last day in town, between check out (where they gave me a guide to BBH Hostels & told me what percentage rating to try to stay above) and taking the bus to Tauranga.
I was able to stash my pack at the i-Site/Bus Terminal, and my backpack in a locker at the top of the luge, so there was no risk of loss or damage.

I’d forgotten how nice the view is from up a mountain – My attention was more focused on riding the little carts down said mountain.
That said; Look how pretty it is!

So I spent some time riding little gravity carts down a hill, on a variety of tracks which wind through forest, then riding a chairlift back up. Didn’t crash into anyone or injure myself, which is an improvement on last time, when I hit the side of the track hard enough to come out of the cart and slide to a stop on the dirt.
Best Day Ever!

And there’s the view.

They’ve got a lot of mountain bike … paraphenalia? … there too. Tracks I’d be hesitant about doing on foot were visible from the gondola which takes you up the mountain, and from the chairlifts which take you back to the top of the luge runs.
Saw the occasional mountain biker on the trails, and many more riding the gondola back up, so I’m not sure where they all went. According to a couple of staff members I talked to on the ride down, there aren’t as many stretcher/airlift rescues as you’d expect.

The staff members also mentioned a very professional luge-cart rustling operation which had been going on, now broken up by Police. None of us could work out why anyone would steal the things; The only work on very smooth concrete and significant slopes, so they’d be bugger-all use to anyone other than a luge operation.

I’d taken a municipal bus out there, but walked back, pausing to take a picture of course;

Quite by accident, I found the end of the line in Rotorua.

There is an operation running little two-person railcars on what used to be the rail line into Rotorua.
Not sure why there’s no train running to a major tourist centre, but there isn’t.

And that was Rotorua.

The bus arrived late, which wouldn’t have been an issue if there hadn’t been a plan for folks to come & pick me up from the drop-off in Tauranga. It all worked out OK, thanks to the wonder of cellphones, a Dutch chap whose daughter was on the bus & giving estimates of lateness, and some guesswork on my part as to when “about fifteen minutes out” was in a town I’d not been to in decades.

This is somewhere between a placeholder and a memory-jogger.
Funny comments, pictures, and witticisms will be added later.
ok, so I lied about the funny. and the witty.

This really starts with the getting there, which was not half the fun.
I mean, it wasn’t bad, though the bus did end up arriving late; It’s just that the ratio seems off in this case. I’d put it at no more than a twentieth of the fun, and most of that is down to a seatmate’s increasingly-frantic parents blowing up his phone.

I took ManaBus from Auckland to Taupo, because … Well, they’re cheap, and the last time I used them they gave me an Easter Egg.

They were not what you’d call organised at the bus stop. A chaotic shambles would be closer to the mark.
One increasingly-annoyed driver trying to check people on, and deal with baggage, and explain where this bus was going, and that that bus was taking the same route because there were a lot of passengers, … What they needed was more people, or maybe a sign.
Eventually bags and people got loaded, though there was a lot of confusion and concern in the crowd; Some people heard bits of the information, there was no-one to ask other than the driver, and he’d hit “I’ve already announced that” mode and was being passive-aggressive about it.
Apart from the bit where he decided that a camo-covered thing which was probably a tent, and was handed to him by someone of West Asian or Middle-Eastern appearance, was the perfect opportunity to make ‘jokes’ about the person being a terrorist. Really, a class act all around.

When I got to Taupo, I wrote this;

There may come a day when I will consider the calendar in a broader context when making travel plans, and make note of public holidays.
And there may come a day when travel through Auckland on a Friday before a long weekend by way of the roading network runs free and clear, unhindered by construction works, accidents, or thousands of people leaving work early in a futile attempt to avoid the crowds.

And the day may come that the City, and indeed the Country, possesses a public transport system worthy of the name, and people eschew their cars, traveling by train or light rail to their well-deserved vacations.

But it was not this day.

Yeah, there was traffic, and we got in a bit late, and the guy next to me made the mistake of telling the parent who was collecting him, and the parent back in Auckland, that this was happening.
They then constantly texted and called him for the next hour, asking for updates, and ‘are you there yet’, and so on.

Given that this is stop one of <<insert number here>>, I went with the easy option and stayed at the Great Lake Motel, where I’d stayed once before, back in 2009, before Trailwalker.

I’m going to work my way up to a bed in a dorm in a backpacker’s hostel, because I don’t really know whether I can do that sort of travel.

I didn’t have much of an agenda for Taupo, and this is borne out, I think, in what I did.
Not much.

I mooched about.
I looked at the pretty scenery.

Cloud-Wrapped Hills Above Taupo

View across Lake Taupo, hopefully towards Ruapehu/Tongariro/Ngaruhoe

I had a go at doing laundry, and went for a wander to find a laudromat.
Sadly, I forgot to get anything in the laundry liquid department on my way there, and I’d missed the line on the flyer which said “Self-Service On Weekends”, so getting some there was right out.
Going to chalk that one up to a Learning Experience, but it was still a nice enough walk, and I did acquire some emergency travel laundry supplies on the way back.

Traveling, Hopefully Non-Leaking, Laundry Supplies

I saw Kung Fu Panda 3 and Zootopia.
(as it happens, at the same movie theatre at which I’d seen the original Kung Fu Panda – we’d been snowboarding in Ohakune, and the weather was crap, so we came to Taupo & went to the movies. also saw Get Smart that day)

Monday was ANZAC Day, and I woke up early enough to attend the Dawn Service, so I did.

Dawn on ANZAC Day in Taupo

The weather cleared up for the occasion, so things were both Scenic & Bloody Cold.
I am not regretting that Merino Base Layer long-sleeved thing.

Taupo Cenotaph, Decorated For ANZAC Day

View Across Lake Taupo on a cold, clear day

It doesn’t show up in this picture, or any of the others I took, but I think I could see a vent on what I’m assuming is Tongariro.
I think.
Could have been an oddly-vertical cloud.

I also wandered along the riverside for a bit while the sun was shining, which, again, was full of scenic prettiness.

Things I Learned
I went with the advice of a friend, and got packing cubes to make the whole clothes thing more manageable.
On various US trips, there were enough clothing items of each sort that they formed their own City-States in my suitcase, jealously guarding their own territory from interloping socks and marauding shirts, and only rarely fraternising. This wasn’t going to work in a backpack with an 8-day supply of everything.

Version One of the scheme was, I think, a good try; The mesh bag which came with the bag for shirts, a couple of small mesh-top packing ‘cubes’ for socks & underwears.†
It worked OK, but involves more faffing about than I’d like.

Version Two involves a dry-bag of the same size as my designated laundry bag, though a different colour (green for dirty laundry, orange for clean clothing, and I’m not sure what the sectarian implications of that are), with all of the shirts, socks, & underwears‡ in the one bag.

† Not a typo.
‡ Totally deliberate.