After Whangamata, the three of us travelled to Rotorua. I could not have been happier to be back in a city. As much as I enjoy the peacefulness of rural areas, and how much Whangamata seemed like it was just for us, I missed the noise of other people living close by. I spent the whole first afternoon wandering around on my own, feeling more relaxed than I had in days (oddly enough).
The one lasting impression of Rotorua though? The smell of
The steam coming over the pools in Kuirau Park was like nothing I'd seen before. One consistent part of this trip is that we are constantly surprised at the blasé nature of Kiwis with regards to active volcanos, thin earth crusts.... When water is being heated because of LAVA maybe don't build a city on top of it????
You can immediately pick us out as tourists simply because we are the only ones looking alarmed whenever anything to do with volcanoes is brought up.
I spent a rainy morning wandering around the park by myself. I usually like visiting places when it's sunny (everything, even Newport, can look lovely in the sunshine) but I had forgotten how beautiful places can look just after it rains. I took the same photos later on in the week when the weather was a bit better, but I much prefer the ones taken on this first visit.
It may have been filled with pools heated up by what I was imagining as a giant crater of underground lava, but Kuirau Park was a really lovely place to visit.
No big deal, just a mud pool heated by geothermal activity.
(Just read online that there was an eruption 15 years ago and huge rocks were shot 10 metres into the air, WHY IS NO ONE CONCERNED ABOUT THIS.)
The steam rising from the pools would fog the paths and sometimes you wouldn't be able to see what was at the end of where you were walking. It was both very cool and slightly scary.
Our worst backpacker-budget-meal so far, and one that may actually beat anything we ate in University (and I'm including my dismal pasta and butter meal of first year).
Baked beans, rice, and tikka masala curry sauce.
Needless to say, Tom was the only one who ate more than a few spoonfuls of the concoction. He actually ate all of it and then licked the bowl clean which was a little excessive, but that's how Tom does Tom.
The lake was HUGE. I had grand plans of walking around it but Tom told me it was 25 miles around and quite quickly quashed those plans. Instead, we wandered around a tiny section of it's edge and spent some time sat out on some rocks that lay further out into the water.
I tried to take a photo that captured the size of it but it was too vast for my iPhone to handle. This is only a tiny portion of what stretched out in front of us!
I accidentally stumbled on the Saturday market during one of my wanders around Kuirau Park. As I was browsing the different food stalls, I was practically dragged to the Maori food stall by my nose. A silver tray of delicious smelling somethings had just been brought out of the oven. After finding out what they were (fried bread) I bought myself one to taste. I spread golden syrup along the middle and BAM. I was in love.
Adding to the list of reasons people in New Zealand should just pack up and leave, this was a pool of bubbling mud. Did you read that? Bubbling mud. Mud that was BUBBLING because of what was underneath it heating it up.
COME ON NEW ZEALAND.
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