Volcanos

Pines creep up a mountain on the road to Rotorua

After the cave tour we set out across sheep and cow country for Rotorua, about 2 hours away.  The road is pretty scenic and not heavily trafficked.  Rotorua is very touristy and a lot of places were booked because of the long weekend.  We used the ISite office to find lodging.  ISites are the NZ tourism board sites, very helpful places for booking lodging, tours and activities and picking up maps.  We walked from our hotel over to a trail along the river that feeds into Lake Rotorua.  A young girl helped us find it – she was a saucy lass on her way from her cousin’s to her brother’s hoping she didn’t get grounded for being home late.  She is the youngest of 14, the rest all brothers.  She wanted to know whether we had ever seen a gold Lamborghini in the US. 

Former landfill, now walking path in Rotorua

Former bath house, now museum in Rotorua

The walk was interesting, but long to downtown.  It led through a former sulfur mining site and later town dump that was being reclaimed as a natural area.  It looked pretty hellish in the thermally active sections with steam and sulfurous gases rising from the yellow and white earth. Apparently one entrepreneur built an  inexpensive bath, but it had to close down after several patrons drowned having passed out from the noxious gases that built up in the bathing rooms. The walk ends downtown at the very nice looking Polynesian spa and the museum housed in the Edwardian era bath house.  It is surrounded by bowling greens, croquet grounds and a rose garden.  Downtown has lots of shops and restaurants but seemed very quiet for a holiday weekend.  We ate at Capriccio, a small Italian pizza place in town.  We ended up chatting with Richard and Sarah, a couple from South Hampton, England who are also in NZ for a month.  They seemed to have been all over the world from the Galapagos to Pocomoke, MD to Australia.  She and I chatted about Words with Friends, while he and Jake discussed golf.  They are also sailors.

Prince's Feather geyser at Te Puia

Lowering food to be cooked in a steam vent

Tourists face Maori warriors

Very buff Maori 

The next day we went to Te Puia, a Maori thermal reserve just outside of town.  They offer a Maori cultural experience which although touristy, was fun and somewhat informative.  A tourist is chosen as the group’s chief and one of the Maori “chiefs” makes sure they are coming in peace and welcomes them.  After a brief display by the warriors everyone files into the ceremonial house to watch several styles of dancing and singing.  There is voluntary audience participating for a couple dances.

You can then wander around the thermal area which has bubbling pools of mud, geysers,  steam vents etc.  It’s all very civilized but reasonably well interpreted. There is also a carving school where you can watch students learning to do traditional carvings and ask questions.

boiling mud

We drove from Rotorua about 80 km to Taupo on a huge lake.  The town is as touristy as Rotorua but maybe slightly more oriented towards adventure tourism and fishing.  We didn’t stop at any of the thermal sites outside of town although there were many.  Seen one boiling mud pool seen them all?  It’s been very hard to choose among sites and still leave enough time to relax and not spend all day driving.

We got information on camping around the lake at the ISite and got groceries and an iced coffee for me in town.  We camped at a small holiday park in Motouapao on the west side of the lake almost at the south end.  We got a small camp site overlooking the water. There seem to be a lot of permanent privately owned sites within this little park and some very cute converted VW vans.  We are sandwiched between an unoccupied very large tent attached to a camper and a Jucy rental van.  It seems very quiet so far at least with just the sound of the birds and cicadas and a little background traffic noise from Rt. 1(Do  all route 1’s have a lot of traffic?). 

black swan on Lake Taupo

View from our Lake Taupo camp site

Cabin at Motuepa Holiday Park, see converted VW cabin in background

Lone goat, not sure why it was stationed there but it had a great lake view

On Tuesday we packed up our wet tent (because of course it started raining during the night) and headed back up to Taupo.  After hanging out at a café for a while we drove the short distance to Huka Falls, a gorge through which the Waikato River passes on its way to Auckland (NZ’s longest river).  It really was an impressive sight, seeing this pale blue water rush through the gorge.  Apparently kayakers will sometimes attempt passage, but we didn’t get to see that.

A little downstream the river is dammed for hydroelectric power with timed releases of water below.  We made our way to RapidsJet, a jetboat ride that goes along the river below the dam. Jetboats were invented in NZ and go very fast.  It's sort of a thrill ride involving lots of fast turns, jetting over rapids and back up rapids and getting soaked.  The guide did give us a little history about the river pointing out where some scenes from the Yogi bear movie were filmed and how they filmed the barrel over the falls scene in the second Lord of the Rings movie.  Most interesting to me was the clear cutting of pines along the banks of the river.  According to our guide the pines were planted after ranchers discovered the soil lacked nutrients needed to keep cattle healthy.  Many generations of pines have been planted and harvested.  Now though they have better fertilizers available so they are starting to bulldoze out the pine roots and replant pasture grasses.  So goes another cycle of farming.