We checked out around 10am and got underway to Rotorua. It probably had to do, at least partially, with the lighting today (patchy clouds and intermittent sunny rain), but this was a marvelously pretty drive. I don't think it beats the Banff-Jasper drive or the Alaska Highway, but it was right up there. Who's up for a lap of New Zealand?
The Rotorua area is a volcanic zone, and the main attraction here for decades has been the thermal features. One of the biggest collections of these features is at the Waiotapu thermal park (more recently rebranded as the Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland). Just have a look at the landscape behind the visitor center: there's a lot of stuff going on.
The park has three connecting loop trails (of increasing time and difficulty, though none of them is particularly difficult unless you need a cane or wheelchair, in which case the third trail isn't for you). As you go through, you see a number of craters, formed where underground thermal activity produced a subsidence (from the activity of water or sulfuric acid), hot pools full of colorful mineral deposits, sulfur caves, and generally a lot of interesting environments. It's infinitely amusing to stand by a bubbling crater, or a fumarole, or even random points on the walking path that are hissing and bubbling over. (You will eventually tire of the hydrogen sulfide smell, but that's a different matter.)
All this thermal activity is put to good use; in the far distance from the park, you can see a geothermal power plant's cooling tower.
The random warm spots caused by fumaroles and hot springs lead to really interesting variation in vegetation. Often, you'll see a patch of warm-weather plants, like ferns, in the middle of a patch of temperate forest, signifying the presence of a warm spot. Of course, sometimes instead you'll see a dead patch of white plants in the middle of some living ones, showing a thermal site that had some toxic gas emissions.
The Devil's Bath, right at the end of the tour, is a crazy bright-green pool that shifts hue depending on the lighting. It's the sort of color I'd only ever seen in pictures of toxic mining runoff pools, but it's all-natural. (I still wouldn't advise bathing in it, unless your name is Beelzebub).
After Waiotapu, we drove 30km north to Rotorua proper to check into our hotel, the Rotorua Central Backpackers. Lunch was had at a takeaway place just down the corner, which has been in business for over 30 years and won numerous awards for its fries. The kumara (sweet potato) fries were, in fact, delicious. The place was also decorated with sweet signs:
Rotorua is built on the edge of a lake filling an old volcanic caldera, and thermal activity pervades the city. The whole place smells faintly (or sometimes not so faintly) of hydrogen sulfide, and apparently every so often the cold taps will run hot! After lunch, we walked out to Kairau Park, one of the two big parks in Rotorua, and a major hotspot of thermal activity itself.
As you approach the park from the east, there's little to indicate that it's that different from any other park. A couple stands of trees are fenced off, but that's nothing weird. Then you see the signs on the fences warning you to stay out of the thermal area and to stick to the footpaths. The features on the edges of the park are a couple small hot pools. As you go deeper, you see more and more: large hot pools, fumaroles, craters, mud pots, even a couple concrete pools connected by pipes to natural hot springs so that visitors can soak their feet. There are a few walking trails that wind among the fenced-off thermal areas, with informative signs about the local flora and ecology.
Next, we headed back east to the Government Gardens, the other big park in Rotorua, that borders the lake. The Rotorua Museum is here, and it's a very nice building. Can't say much more, since it was closed by the time we showed up. The gardens are a bit bare in the winter, but barring one hot spring, whose waters are piped to the Polynesian Spa in the park, you could almost forget you're in a volcanic area as you go for your lakefront stroll.
You could forget, that is, until you reach the lake itself. This is no Lake Tahoe, pristine blue and lined with grass and sandy beaches. This lake is volcanic, through and through. As you get close to the shore, you see more thermal features and general moonscapes. As the sun was setting, we decided to abandon our lakeside hike and head back to the hostel.
For dinner tonight, I felt like being economical, like eating lamb (when in NZ...), and conveniently, like cooking. We hit up the local Pak 'N Save, and thirty dollars later had all the ingredients for dinner. Rotorua Central Backpackers has a nicely equipped kitchen; soon thereafter Meat Fest 2012 continued apace with lamb loin and shoulder chops seasoned with salt and pepper and fried in garlic butter, garlic bread, and OJ. All were in agreement that it was one of the best dinners so far on the trip, and certainly the cheapest.
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