After spending the morning packing and having one final homecooked breakfast with our lovely AirBnB host, we packed up the car and headed to Rotorua’s Redwood Forest. It was actually a bit of a spur of a moment decision to check out the Redwood Forest that morning as we had some time to spare before our midday flight to Christ Church.

We started our second day in Rotorua early as we were hitting two popular tourist sights that required a bit of a drive. First up, it was Wai-o-tapu Thermal Wonderland. Beware, there is quite the rotten egg smell throughout the park given that it’s an active geothermal area. To be honest though, you get used to the smell quite quickly that you hardly notice it after a while. It’s a fairly large park with a variety of colourful and interesting hotsprings and boiling mudpools. Definitely worth a visit and you’ll have plenty of photographic opportunities. One of the special attractions is the Lady Knox Geyser that shoots up to heights of 10 to 20 metres. Some of my favourite images from the north island was actually taken here at Wai-O-Tapu.