Rafting, Tubing, Surfing and soon to be Caving

Back at Charles's for some peace and quiet so I thought I'd give a little update. On Thursday I went white water rafting in Rotorua, which was really wicked. We rafted a 7 meter waterfall (one of the highest commercially rafted ones in the world) and overall got completely soaked. The guides just basically screwed around with us the entire time, even convincing one girl to jump in and then paddling away from her. I did that in the morning, and as soon as we got out of the river it just started to pour. Sadly I don't have any pictures, because they were charging 40 bucks for a CD, and there were only about 8 pictures that I was actually in. It rained the entire rest of the day, so the entire hostel basically ended up watching movies and hanging out, until the night time when it finally cleared up.
The next day, Charles picked me up in Rotorua because he had some business down there to attend to. We drove up in a quite uneventful trip, and then hung out with Nick and Becs and drank a couple of beers. We set up the Christmas tree at night, which was pretty wierd considering it was actually warm outside!
On Saturday I slept in, and then we hooked up the boat and went down to the river. We ripped around in that, and I got to do some biscuiting which I haven't done in years. Becs was too scared to do biscuiting or kneeboarding, but I think Charles was quite happy for me to drive the boat while he went for a ride. I drove it as gnarly as I could and managed to send him for a huge tumble which he was still complaining about a couple of days later! We eventually ran out of gas, so came back to Charles' and went to a super cheap bakery that had really good food. Then I offered to paint the fence, and so earned my room and board for at least a couple of nights!
On Sunday we went for a drive around town and checked out the local sights. There aren't many to be honest, but there was a cool 3/4 size Spitfire which I'll try and upload a couple of pictures of later. There was also an Aviary but sadly no Kiwis were in attendance. We then went to a cool English Pub for some appies and a beer, before coming back to Charles' where Nick and Becs spent the next couple of hours playing some Wrestling game on PS2, and Charles went to the Supermarket. For dinner we went to Donna's and had a couple bottles of Hardy's Sparkling Wine (don't worry we walked over). I played a whole bunch of Guitar Hero then, which I'd never played before, but I can see why it's considered such a good game. Too bad it doesn't actually help with real guitar playing...
On Monday Charles and I dropped the kids off at school, and then he drove me out to Raglan as he had some work to do there. I booked myself in at the hostel, and then managed to get into a surfing lesson at Manu Bay (it's featured in some movie!). It was so fun, although the instructors had to spend a disproportionate amount of time with the Germans who didn't understand English very well. I ended up being one of the first to get up on a wave, and then went the furthest too! We spent two hours in the sea doing that, and now I'm totally hooked. It was raining the entire time too, but I hardly noticed because I was having so much fun! I was super tired by the evening, and just wanted to go to bed around 8, but decided I had to stay awake longer for appearances sake.
I slept right in until 9:30 today, and then managed to hitch a ride with the hostel owner who was going into Hamilton. I wondered around town for a bit, then decided to come back here and work on booking a ferry ticket as everyone at the hostel said it was very difficult to book one in the 10 days or so before Christmas. I think I panicked in vain though, as only a couple of the ferries are actually sold-out.
And that's me caught up for the last couple of days! I'm going down to Waitomo Caves with Charles tomorrow (and maybe the Kiwi House!) and then I think I'll go on to National Park from there. I don't know at the moment if I will be able to get to Napier (if the ferries are actually that bad) but Taupo should be in the works.