Wai-O-Tapu and Sir Didymus... and maybe Ludo...

08/03/09

We get up bright and early this morning. No, not just before lunch, REALLY early… We are at the café/delicatessen we spotted, Capers Epicurean, almost before anyone else and the chap serving behind the counter is rather surprised to see Rotorua tourists in so early. He is lovely, however, and chats to us about food and Wai-O-Tapu. We have a good solid cooked breakfast each and buy savoury muffins to do for lunch. We get ourselves back to the YHA in time for our little bus, and are relieved to find that we are not the last. The pace of life is far more relaxed here – if you’re really late you will miss things, but by and large life turns more slowly and a few moments here and there are gathered and lost as things happen.
I chat to a friendly, intelligent Canadian guy on a year out and he is nearly due to go home… As are another couple who we chat to later on. It seems to be the season of reason! :P

We are popped out of the coach at an enormous mud pool. I exclaim in delight as I see the big, glutinous bubbles popping and forming rings in the distance, but the second I draw breath I am disenchanted…
Dear Lord, this stuff STINKS!!!
It is, on first scent, utterly indescribable. I have no words for the chemical foulness that assails my nostrils so I merely hope they will shut down in fright and head on hopefully, camera poised. There are some corking photos to be had here though… It is fun just to watch the steaming bubbles burst and spread the thin film of mud about with varying degrees of vigour. One bubble might be regular, another might be erratic and more forceful. They are all entertaining, unpredictably popping and glopping, steaming and frothing, spewing out grey goo under my watchful lens.
But they smell AWFUL… Every time one bursts, a waft of fetid fug steams across the pathway. The steam feels nice on your skin, but the nearest trees have clearly tried and failed to defy the chemicals in it. Many of them are dead, grey twigs, coated in a layer of strange residue and sticky mud.
There is a sudden lessening of people here, and I trot back to the bus before I get left behind in the pong.
Onward!
Our next stop is no less stinky, but slightly fresher, being more open. This little arena has been built around an uninspiring little steamy tower, a little like a termite mound. A man stands at the front, in a green ranger’s uniform.
This is Lady Knox Geyser (and that’s Geyser, not Geezer, as the uniformed chap insists…). Before he requests it perform for our entertainment (and there is something rather like the Clangers’ Soup Well about all this), he tells us the recent history of the geyser. There was an open prison here a while back and it consisted mainly of men who were helping to build things. As the prisoners all lived here and had to look after themselves, some of them one day decided that dunking their socks in the nice hot water in Lady Knox would be a good way to get them clean. They gave their socks a good soapy scrubbing and popped them in for a nice hot rinse.
To their astonishment, the thermal pool they’d tried to wash their socks in, spat those same socks right back out again, several feet in the air, and continued to blow water sky high for a good half hour after that! The prisoners had discovered that soap breaks the surface tension inside the geyser, just enough to allow the hot water to emerge to the surface and break through the layer of cold water above, allowing the rest of the hot water free passage to the outside world.
The little tower around the geyser’s core was built by the prisoners for fun. After all, I imagine a soapy sock fountain would be pretty good entertainment if you had no alternative!
The chap at the front scatters a large amount of eco-friendly, biodegradable soap into the mouth of the geyser and continues to talk by her side as she begins to froth at the mouth. He soon moves though, as she gathers force and begins to fire her hot water over the surrounding area. Eventually, I believe it can reach heights of up to 40 feet, but I’m not about to step in and measure it. I just enjoy the display! There ought to be a rainbow here somewhere, I think, but I can see no sign of one. A lucky butterfly, however, flits into the spewing spray and, to my astonishment, flits out, a little confused but not boiled alive, on the other side.

We hop back into our tourbus and head onto Wai-O-Tapu, Thermal Wonderland! Cheesy name, but they haven’t ruined or Disneyfied it, which is good.
The smell here is still indescribably horrible but the vistas and views are worth the stench.
The National Park is set up so that there are several walks you can do to see various different areas of thermal activity. Andrew and I decide that if we trot we can probably manage the longer one, which seems more exciting.
First stop is the Champagne Pool and Artist’s Palette. The stench is almost forgotten in the otherworldliness of this place. It is boiling, and vivid hues of rusty orange and bile green. The steam from the boiling colours is pleasantly warm and feels strangely good on one’s skin. There is a light breeze blowing, and I take each opportunity to gasp in fresh air from pockets which alleviate the steam briefly and sporadically. These pockets also allow a slightly better photograph. It is strange to see other people’s lenses coming towards you through the murk, followed by a disembodied leg or bag, then a steamy shadow of someone. This pool is the violent, bilious colours it is, because of the vast quantities of minerals being pumped up from hundreds of feet below. These noxious colours contain such things as arsenic. I begin to wonder about the steam and head off to find Andrew, who I have lost in it…
Oops.
I find him again and we wander through oddly-coloured bush, funny-smelling puddles and everywhere there are little rivulets and pools, some steaming and boiling, others just suspiciously empty of any life. A few foolhardy cicadas sizzle their little songs near the water’s edge. Some have fallen in and are now boiling gently… Not a sensible real estate choice!
We pass big pools, little pools, steam and everywhere green – vicious, poisonous, lime green, not to be trifled with… Beautiful but deadly. We head into a slightly more brushy area. I think I am acclimatising to the stink. Now I seem to be able to pick out certain smells within it. It begins to smell merely of burnt rubber and overcooked cabbages, with even a faint undertone of ragwort honey.
We head around a little bit of cliff and spot a large hole… Andrew thinks it could well be the nesting hole of the rare geothermal badger!
Here and there seems to be a faint whiff of curry too… Some of these pools are clearly at a good rolling boil, and have been for a centuries. An egg dropped into one of these would be cooked to a turn in no time at all! Some of the boggy areas even sizzle and you can see the little bubbles rising to the surface in their hordes. We look at the time and see that we need to be trotting off to find our coach or we’ll be left with the smell forever!
However, despite being a little bit acclimatised by this point, there is still no way that the word ‘smell’ really covers this noxious stench. The penultimate sight to see is an impressive one. A vast vivid turquoise lake, stretching out a long, long way, with no discernible life anywhere on it, in it or around it. This desert of water is one of the more frightening things I have seen, purely because it prohibits all life yet is intoxicatingly beautiful and inviting…
The last pool is the Devil’s Pool – this is a bright and virulent green and looks every inch as poisonous as it probably is. It’s practically glowing!
We get to the bus before it has thought about leaving, which is good… and head back to the relatively fresh smell of Rotorua. We plan the rest of our day. We have eaten our savoury muffins (which were fantastic by the way – I can recommend Capers in Rotorua for any meal!) so decide to head vaguely toward the harbour where we hope to catch a plane flight out over Rotorua and the surrounding volcanoes. We are a little sceptical as it has been overcast for much of this morning and could be a little windy with not much to see…
We get to the kiosk and a genuinely friendly lady chats to us happily and says that there should be space for a flight later without booking, takes our names and says that if we don’t like the look of the weather when we come back later we can either take a later one or just go and do something else. We are happy with this relaxed approach and wander off to have a look at the rest of the town. Rotorua is, despite the smell, rather a nice place to be. There is a Sunday market, which we peep at, a gorgeous museum, which we don’t look in but thoroughly enjoy the nice architecture, and the various shops and other things to do. We check out the Polynesian Spa as an idea for later…

So, an hour or so later, fortified with ice-cream, we head back to the harbour, where the sky looks promising and we are introduced to our pilot, Steven. We hand over money, get ourselves weighed, leave our bags there and are led out to the water’s edge, where a little sea plane is waiting for us. Steven takes our photos with the plane then he and the girl from the kiosk push and pull the light aircraft until it is in the right place for getting in and starting. He helps us both aboard, at which point I notice with a sense of rising panic that he is slightly boss-eyed…
Ah well, too late now!
Still, he seems to be a perfectly capable, knowledgeable and friendly pilot and chats to us about what we can see and encourages us to chatter back too. He asks what we’ve been up to and what we’re doing later. We tell him we are hoping to get to the Polynesian Spa here are apparently stories of swinging couples meeting there in secret on Sunday nights! He takes over some of the most disturbed countryside I have ever seen and it is stunning. The sun is out and we are the first people today to have seen the top of the volcano. It blew fairly recently (in volcanic terms), only a decade or so ago, and tore a great chunk out of its own middle, forever changing the landscape. There is a gigantic red and sandy scar across the centre of the mountain where the force of the eruption blew it apart. We fly over lakes and forests, some of this is Maori land, some used for farming. It is all stunning; the light glitters off the water and brings the trees to vibrant green life. It is awesome, amazing… We stare, largely speechless, down at the landscape, carved by fire and painted by trees, and I once again appreciate how small we are to be living here, and how lucky we are to be able to see this. We come down in the water close to the harbour and a family of swans with four fluffy grey cygnets has to paddle frantically to avoid us! They are fine.
This is the first time Andrew has ever been in a light aircraft, and only my second. When we get out, he is grinning from ear to ear. :)
We trip happily off down the harbour front with our photos and watch birds. There are black swans aplenty down here, as well as ducks and gulls. The black swans are clearly used to being fed and congregate around you if you stop for long near the water. They are very picturesque, dipping their dainty black necks into the water for weeds and swimming together, making heart shapes in silhouette, tail feathers unfurled.
There is suddenly a huge kerfuffle and they all flap off in an ungainly way. I can’t imagine what could possibly have upset them so much, until I see a large cob swan coming through with his sleek hen and the same cygnets we nearly flattened sliding smugly through the water behind. Clearly the local water fowl are used to the royal babies taking precedence to such an extent that it’s not even worth arguing any more!
His wing feathers are so proudly puffed out that his white petticoats are visible beneath his wings.

We decide to head for the spa after this and before dinner… I’ve never been to a spa pool before and want to see what it is like. And after all the stinky walking this morning, I could really do with a nice soak! We decide to go for the slightly more expensive pools as they look far nicer on the pictures and include towels and soap etc. We get changed, leaving all metal things behind as they go a funny colour apparently, and meet in the pool. There is no sign of any swinging going on, much to our disappointment! ;) There are four pools here, all set up to look relatively natural, irregularly shaped with lovely plants and local boulders built into them. They are fed directly from the hot springs and are of four different temperatures: 36, 38, 40 and 42 degrees. We begin in the 38, which is fairly hot for me, but still quite pleasant. We float idly in the hot water. The smell isn’t too bad here – the hot springs clearly carry mineral salts and good things rather than the bad-egg stench of the pools at Wai-O-Tapu. They’re still pretty pongy though. The steam is pleasant, cleansing and refreshing, and the components of the water leave your skin feeling silk-encrusted as you emerge into the cool air. We dot between pools, relaxed and happy in the warm water. I find the 42 a little on the warm side, though Andrew loves it.
I like outdoor bathing – you get the benefits of the steam, the hot water, the refreshing cool air and views of not only the sky but of the plants and the rest of Rotorua and its thermal pools too. It is a wonderful experience. We don’t want to leave, but by 8pm both our tummies are rumbling, we are saturated in odd-smelling chemicals and feeling a bit like a pair of prunes. We reluctantly haul ourselves out of the warm water and shower, before heading back into town to find some dinner.
We wander through town, mostly brightly lit and welcoming and find ourselves at the Indian end of town. Neither of us fancies curry right now, so we head back down another street and find an Italian restaurant. It is dimly lit and looks friendly. Nice smell too, apart from the all-pervasive sulphur scent. We enjoy pizza and pasta and nice drinks and nibblies. We are still very relaxed and sleepy from the spa, which is nice. I notice a table to my left of people talking animatedly to a tall grizzled gentleman in designer glasses and grey jumper. He has his arms folded and looks disgruntled. I catch snippets of conversation like ‘…standards…’, ‘flavour wasn’t as it should have been in…’, ‘…presentation; the plate was chipped…’. I begin to feel quite sorry for this harassed, grizzled chap, who I suspect may be the manager or head chef or something. I don’t know what this family of gourmets was expecting, but Andrew and I had a darn good, tasty feed and said as much to the waitress, in earshot of the grey gentleman… If you’re paying $15 for a course, you expect nice nosh, not epicurean silver service – and nice nosh was most definitely what we got.
Oof, I’m full…

;)