Our first day in Rotorua

What a day we have had! Mrs P and I had a good flight from Nelson to Rotorua. Tiny Ted asked if he could go up into the cockpit of the plane while it was flying!
Here Mrs P and Tiny Ted pose for a photo on the plane.
The plane was full of teachers going to conference and the pilot was too scared to say no so Tiny Ted got to sit at the very front of then plane. That is the captain of the plane looking at the camera! I hope the co-pilot was steering!
As I was walking up to the front of the plane with Tiny Ted a lady said that she recognised Tiny Ted from our blog. She didn’t recognise me as I don’t put my photo on the blog very often. Imagine someone recognising a very small bear and not the teacher whose blog he is featured on.

We flew over Wellington. You can see the Wellington stadium in the photo. We were a long way up!
Once we found our motel we had a couple of free hours so did a tour of Te Puia geyserland.

Here is a photo of me by the entrance to the area. There were lots of geysers. The whole town of Rotorua smells like sulphur.
Can you see Tiny Ted by the pataka. A pataka is a Maori storage area. It is up on stilts so in the old days rats can’t get in and eat everything up!

I went inside a whare with Tiny Ted and showed him all the carvings. Each carving shows an ancestor. Tiny Ted thought the carvings were magnificent.


After that we looked at the mudpools. This area looked like a whole lot of mini-plopping volcanoes with boiling mud and steam coming up out of the ground.

Then we went on to Pohutu geyser. I took a couple of good videos but haven’t got the time to upload them. I will show you them when I get back. When the geyser went off you could feel the ground rumbling underneath your feet. It was spectacular and we were really pleased that we had the time to do a tourist thing before the computer conference started.

In the evening all 1500 teachers at the conference went to a meeting and Jennifer Corriero, a lady from Canada, spoke to us about a youth web site called Taking it global. It was very interesting and I will have more of a look at it when I get home.

I haven’t had time to make a podcast yet although I have made some recordings.

Be good. Leave me some comments so I know you have seen the blog.

What did you think of the podcast with Jessica?

Miss K