Maketu

From Raglan we headed south to the sun and Waitomo caves. These are a huge network of limestone caves and most of us had signed up to go black water rafting which is actually tubing. We kitted out in a couple of layers of thick wet suites and headed to the caves. I thought I'd signed up for a lazy river type thing looking at glow worms but it was actually a caving trip and we scrambled over the rocks and squeezed through gaps and the tubing sector was actually pretty small. The caving was so much fun though and the glow worms were amazing.

After a tiring few hours we headed back over to the East coast to Maketu on the Bay of Plenty. Here we were to have a bit of a cultural evening as we stayed with a local Maori family who earnt extra pennies by housing the entire bus in their meeting house (a huge hall), putting on a little concert and feeding us traditional food which I certainly didn't expect it to be roast chicken, beef stew, potato and stuffing! The family was really cool and it was interesting to see Maori culture as the family are descendant's of the Arawa tribe and they allocated our tribe a chief and greeted us the traditional way of shaking hands and pressing noses together. The boys learnt the Haka (All Blacks style) which they were really good at. The girls all learnt the Poi which is a ball on a string which you swing and catch in time to music. It was definitely harder than I thought it was going to be. I was dreading the evening before we got there but it was actually a fun evening and the family were lovely. I wish we weren't woken up at 7am to the entire of Abba's greatest hits though!