Rotorua: The Luge

When we asked our house owner 'Any interesting place nearby to recommend?' The first place came across his mind was 'The luge in Rotorua'. The luge? What was that? Then, he showed us the photos in the website, my respond was 'Huh? This thing just similiar with the Go Cart in Malaysia. We can play it in Genting as well. What's so special about this?' So, we didn't show much interest in this Luge at that moment.

After couple of days, he asked us whether we want to go or not. This round we said yes because we did not have any plan for the weekend. During that Sunday,we drove to Rotorua and stopped by i site to purchase the tickets. Yes, we purposely bought ticket from i site as the tickets selling was cheaper than those selling at the counter!! My house owner don't even know about this and he kept on asking 'why, why, why' to the staff in i site. Haha You see, sometimes tourist know more than local. :P

Here we came, the luge. We took a cable car up to the station!

When we reached there, it was raining, so we took our lunch at the skyline cafe in The Luge theme park (I think it doesn't called as theme park but it is a theme park for me).

Fish and chip. Argh, the worst fish and chip that I ever had in NZ. Disappointing.

Swiss roll. Dessert in NZ is always too sweet for me.

Steak cruiser. Yeah, this was the best food among the three that we ordered. It was something similiar like steak pie. Not bad.

We took this up the hill and started our luge journey!

Yes, the luge. This is totally different with the F1 in Genting. Genting one is quite slow even u press for full speed. But, the luge is much faster and it runs due to the slope of the hill. Brakes are available so you can control your speed by using it. There are three different categories for us to choose, scenic, intermediate and fast. We were quite greedy and we want to choose intermediate during our first ride because we just purchased for 2 rides.

However, we were stopped by our house owner as he commented that we had to go for scenic first because we didnt' know how to control it. OK, fine, scenic first.

Wao, I felt good for the first ride! Since second ride was the last ride, we chose the fast one. Fast one was really different with scenic. But something stupid happened. My luge stopped at one of the turning!! Yes, stop! Then, I was forced to move my luge MANUALLY. I use my leg to move the luge!!! So embarrasing and I guess those who saw me must be laughing non stop. Sob sob... Now I know even there was slope but technique was still needed to let the luge keep moving.. sweat...

We had our 2 rides and we just loitering around. There was an cherry blossom way but we only saw stick at that garden due to the winter.

Fees: $33 (2 rides + gondola)

Try it if you have extra budget.