Advertisement
Published: September 29th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Taupo is the start of a lot of the thermal activity that the central north island is famous for and just north of town is the Borefield geothermal powerstation with its miles of shiny steaming, hissing pipes that trace across the landscape... and people complain about the visual impact of a few wind turbines! Wells up to 2000metres deep tap into zones of hot fluid at temperatures of 200 odd degC and insulated pipes transmit the steam from these to the power station at about 200kph!
After cruising around there for a while we continued perusing the area and came across the suspiciously calm Aratiatia Rapids, which at first we thought were rather unspectacular, but then realised that they were part of a hydroelectric scheme and were only turned on 3 times a day for half an hour... With the light fading we decided to visit them the following day at the right time and embarked upon a disastrous mission to find a free campsite, finally succeeding after 1.5 hours when we parked up in a muddy lane. By this point of course we could have just paid for a proper site at the start given the amount of fuel
we had used up, not to mention the stress!! Heh-ho you win some...
First stop the following morning were the impressive Huka Falls, a series of steps over which the Wairakei River falls as it leaves Lake Taupo. Then it was a quick dash around the mildly underwhelming ‘Craters of the Moon’ to look at some steaming holes and some slightly bubbling mud. The rushing around was partly because it was starting to rain, but mainly to make sure that we didn’t miss the 10AM switch-on at the Aratiatia Rapids. As the flood gates were opened there wasn’t exactly a huge wall of water, but it was interesting to watch the gorge fill as the level of the river rose by 5m or so, temporarily engulfing small trees and initiating a flurry of activity from the fantail birds as they gorged themselves on all the displaced bugs!
Then it was on to the stinky-egg town of Rotorua, the hub of all things thermal. It was certainly rotten in the smelly sense of the word and as the rain continued and we were bewildered with hundreds of excursions each costing 100’s of bucks, we began to think it was
rotten from a budget travellers perspective too. So what to do if you aren’t a tourist with dollars to burn?? Well our advice if you are short on cash would be to make do with the impressively active Kuirau Park that sits right near the middle of town and you can wander around for free watching the steam and boiling mud. One dream trip that we would have loved to do was take a flight or boat out to White Island, a very active volcano lying on the same fault off the east coast. We consoled ourselves with the fact that hopefully we would see plenty of volcanoes in South America later on and save ourselves a small fortune. When we discovered that White Island has the very real potential of erupting and creating a devastating tsunami, we began to understand that the dramatic sounding radio broadcasts reminding NZ residents to ‘be prepared for a natural disaster’ were not without foundation.
Still on our permanent economy drive we had a slightly more successful attempt (only just) to find a free spot, ending up 20k’s out of town between the Green and Blue Lakes. Waking to torrential rain again the
next day, we drove around the north side of Lake Rotorua near to Okere Falls, where we had booked to go white water rafting with Raft-a-bout the next day. To understand what we were letting ourselves in for we watched a few boats plunging 7m off the Grade 5 Kaituna Falls, apparently the highest commercially raftable falls in the world. So the pictures you see here aren’t us, but they might as well have been 24 hours later! Already feeling a bit downhearted with the weather, our recent difficulties in finding free campsites and cheap activities, we then managed to get ourselves a puncture from a beer bottle in the muddy lay-by we choose as home for the night! It wasn’t all bad, the spare went on OK and we had taken the extra insurance to cover tyres and windscreen, so it was covered and we had a decent night’s sleep in preparation for our rafting trip the next morning.
Not a great deal to say about the rafting, hyped by the ‘highest commercially raftable waterfall’ marketing blurb Lexa had worked herself up about it, but ended up loving it and it certainly was good fun, just all over
a bit quickly, probably 20 - 30mins on the water at the most. Nevertheless, it was a good deal for us as we had the free voucher for one of us from Ezy and we came away agreeing to do some more if we got the chance somewhere cheaper in South America.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.065s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 25; dbt: 0.045s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb