Rotorua, New Zealand Jan 21 & 22, 2010

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Luck certainly wasn’t with us; our drive to Rotorua required us to back-track taking the same twisty road back over the mountains. One puzzling feature of New Zealand roads is that there will be turn where your vision is only 25 feet ahead and the white line in the centre will be a broken line indicating that one can pass. In Canada there would be solid lines indicating no passing, but here in New Zealand broken lines indicating that it was okey to pass, fortunately no one was foolish enough to try. After our drive we setoff on a walk around a portion of the lake finishing just as the clouds opened up and the rain arrived.

Rotorua is located within a very thermo area, almost everywhere one looks in town and outside there is steam rising and a thermal pool with boiling water or mud or a geyser shooting water 20 feet or more into the air. It is also a must place to visit, nearby there are caverns with glow worms, Moari shows, good food, great hiking trails (but then there are great hiking trails everywhere in New Zealand), even a sheep show where they show all the different kinds of sheep plus shear one in a couple of minutes.

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Photos

Rotorua
The flower gardens surrounding the former hot spring medical centre

Rotorua
Looking back towards the former medical centre that provided differnt kinds of hot baths that were suppose to cure what ailed you

Duck Boat
We took a ride on the lake facing Rotorua and one of the lakes in the mountains outside Rotorua

Rotorua
We passed this waterfall just outside of Rotorua. We saw a large number of waterfalls during our visit

Maori
Prior to the Maori show the performers arrived in canoes.