Rotarua
is at the heart of the North Islands volcano fields. The town is built on and
around geothermal features - there are hot baths to visit, reconstructed Maori
villages and lots of bubbling sulphur pools to survey.
The whole town has a rather eggy smell. I deny any responsibility, it wasn't
me... In fact, its caused by the sulphurous gasses escaping from a myriad of
yellow fringed holes (that's my story and I'm sticking to it).
We visit three geothermal parks - Wai-O-Tapu (Sacred Water), Whakarewarewa,
and the more cunningly named 'Hells Gate'.
At
Wai-O-Tapu we watch as a ranger primes the Lady Knox guyser with a little soap
powder - this breaks the surface tension of a thin layer of cool water that sits
over a subterranean lake of superheated water, enabling the two to mix and
eventually overflow - this causes the guyser to send a plume of water 30m into
the air for several minutes before subsiding and returning to its original
state.
This
soap trick was discovered by prisoners planting pines nearby - they were
surprised to find that when they put their clothes in a crater of warm water
with a little soap, the water erupted and deposited their underpants in the
branches of nearby trees. The Worlds first washer dryer?
Pams entry:
On
the List of Must See were the geysers.
First the Lady Knox geyser which a chap
primed with soap powder and which did a lovely job of erupting and spraying the
spectators in the front rows.
A
fine sight and then we went on to see some “terraces” . It was a sort of
circular walk over rocks, both on the flat and with inclines. You could walk
through - and over - and look down upon - hissing, bubbling pools of eggy
smelling water. At the edges of these pools could be seen layers of different
coloured rock, stained vermilion with antimony, Iron oxide and sulphur.
Jason
located yet another place (Devils Gate) which seemed
pretty unknown and we could wander about with hardly anybody else around and
look into pools of jet black boiling mud, others of a gruesome yellow, some of
inky blue, some creamy white – each coloured with another mineral. Fascinating
stuff...
Off again, we pushed on to Nelson which
was pretty but absolutely full of churches and other places of worship. At the
sea front there were PRIVATE CLUBS, exclusive to MEMBERS. We did not like the
feel of the place – it smelt of god bothering and smug self importance. We
didn’t stay - instead we whizzed on to Napier.
