As we headed further down the north island of New Zealand, we stopped in a town called Rotorua – also known to some as Rotovegas. Apparently, it’s a town you either love or hate with no one really being lukewarm to the place.
It’s major industry is tourism and it’s known for it’s geothermal activity, featuring geysers, hot mud pools and sulfur springs. We caught a glimpse of the Pohutu geyser driving by and it was pretty impressive!
However, our primary reason for stopping in Rotorua was to go to Skyline. We’d heard from our friends in Auckland that it was a “must do” for Jack! You take a gondola up the side of a mountain and then you luge halfway down the mountain and can take a chairlift back up to the top to do it all over again. When I think luge, I think winter Olympics and people in lycra onesies rocketing down a half pipe of ice. Not exactly the same kind of luge we’re talking about here (thankfully because I left my lycra onesie stateside)! I can most closely equate it to a Big Wheel for adults. You sit in a little plastic cart that you can steer and go shooting down the mountain! You can see the carts behind Jack in the picture below…
It was such a blast! We thought we’d only go a few times, but Jack kept wanting to go again and again! It’s such an amazing view on the way down with the lake and the mountains in the background. And you get a good view of all of the mountain biking paths on the way down as well. They have some serious mountain biking obstacles on the different paths.
We finish up the luge and it’s time for lunch, so we grab a bite to eat at the café at the top of the chairlift. Jack sees they have zip lining available on the way to the restaurant and now wants to give that a go. We check it out and they weigh and measure him and he is barely tall enough to do it! We sign up and then get lunch. After lunch they weigh him again just to double check and he put on 1 kilogram at lunch, so that should help weigh him down a bit, ha!
The zip line is 400 meters long and you can get up to speeds of 70 mph! We have two guides, Joel and Jordan, and they are great. We got all of our gear on and carry it down to the platform you launch from. The three of us are in a group with four girls from Tahiti that are all a little freaked out and nervous. Jack is dying to go, so volunteers to go first, which is fine with them. There were two side by side lines, so Jack and Matt went first and I went as a solo behind them.
It was AWESOME! We all loved it. Afterward, you get to do a freefall jump down from the platform. You’re hooked in to a cord and it lets you freefall for 9 feet and then it gives you a slow descent after that to the ground. It was so unnatural to just fall back, but so fun!
We finished and Jack immediately wanted to do it again! We had already stayed much longer than we’d planned, but when we get to the top they told us if you go a second time you get a discount. So…of course we had to do an encore performance!
The Detour Diary 