New Zealand

We’ve come on a short break to New Zealand. Just a few days on the North Island this time, to see the mud pools and geothermal springs.

Today we drove through Rotorua to the Waimangu Volcanic Valley where we walked down to Lake Rotomahana, past craters, bright blue pools and hot bubbling springs. It was spectacular – steam rising through the rainforest trees, bright green algae, rust red rocks and pale blue waters. All created after the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886. It was such a massive explosion that it made one huge lake from the two smaller ones, completely wiped out the pink and white terraces (the tourist attractions of the time) and created a 17 kilometre rift, the end of which is the Waimangu Volcanic Valley. The eruption cloud was 10 kilometres high. Ten kilometres!

When we reached the lake we had a private boat tour – private due to the pouring rain and us being the only tourists there. We chugged across the lake and saw the place where the white terraces used to be and the place where the pink terraces used to be, along with steaming craters and geysers that were actually there steaming and geysering.

The whole experience was both stunning and fascinating, and like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

On the way back to our Airbnb Don and I gave in to our love of a foreign supermarket and our diabolical fear of running out of food. Not food that has vitamins and nutrients. Not even food that we keep to hand in our own home. Nope, for reasons unknown, when travelling we urgently require a stockpile of snack food.

We left the supermarket with two blocks of cheese, a box of crackers, the biggest packet of chips we could find, three bagels and an enormous block of chocolate. We stashed it in our mini-kitchen with the packet of Tim-tams from our hosts, the half a muffin I had leftover from morning tea and the chocolate chip biscuits that we’d bought on the road the day before. Later that night we added the leftovers from dinner.

That should keep us going until tomorrow when we get to visit more geothermal attractions and another supermarket.