Getting away at last!

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At last we’ve managed to get out and some of New Zealand!! After 10 weeks here we decided to hire a car and head north to Lake Taupo which is pretty much in the centre of the North Island.

The lake itself was created relatively recently, less than 2,000 years ago in fact. It was born when a massive volcano erupted, spewing 24 cubic kilometres of rock, debris and ash miles into the air - to put that in context, that’s 10 times the amount produced by the huge eruptions of Krakatoa and Mount St. Helens combined! The ash was carried around much of the world and scientists have therefore been able to place the eruption in 186AD when the Chinese noted a blackening of the sky and the Romans recorded that the heavens turned blood-red. Must have been a shocker!! Anyway, the roof on the empty magma chamber collapsed and left a huge deep-sided crater which eventually filled with water creating Lake Taupo as we know it today. And it’s pretty big, I can tell you.

The journey there wasn’t particularly pleasant - despite only being just 380kms (230 miles), it took us a little over 6 hours! There were a number of contributing factors including the traffic getting out of Wellington (even though we left at 4:15), the low speed limits (max is 100kmph = 60mph), the generally crappy roads and the accident that made us sit still just 50 kms for almost an hour while they cleared up the wreckage and opened the road again. It also didn’t help that Jo-Ann was pulled over by the coppers and was breathalysed!! She wasn’t even capable of saying her address right never mind driving safely…..embarrassing or what…??!

Anyway, we eventually arrived at the quaint Bickers Homestay at 10:15pm pretty knackered. It was a great choice of B&B - run by a lovely old couple at least mid-70s, the lady of the house arrived in NZ from Reading 50 years ago to get some agricultural work for some experience and never went home. She married a local and they’re still together and running the B&B in their spare time - they still travel loads and are off to the West Island (aka Australia) for a month in June to travel around. It was the best breakfast we’d had in years - cereal with fresh fruit (apples, oranges, pineapple, kiwi fruit, etc.), toast and jam and a cooked breakfast of bacon, fried tomatoes and 2 fried eggs. Majestic!! The downside to the stay was the midget sized bed - even wee Jo-Ann found it ‘compact’.

On the Saturday we walked along the Waikato River to the Huka Falls (so named from the Maori word ‘Hukanui’ which means ‘great body of water’). Rather than a huge vertical drop waterfall like Niagara or Victoria, the Huka Falls are more of a mental rollercoaster ride as the voluminous Waikato River is forced down a narrow chasm then plunges off a 10m shelf creating a seething mass of whiteness and madness!! The sheer power of 400 tonnes of water per second is exciting to view!

We then went on a 2 hour boat cruise on the replica steamboat, the Ernest Kemp - I thought it was a cool name as not only is Kemp my Dad’s middle name but Ernest is also the Sunday name of one of my two heroes from Sesame St. It was a cracking day weather wise once the early morning mist had burned through and the lake was like glass at times. The boat took us around the lake and also to some amazing Maori rock carvings that have been done over the years - the artistry and craftsmanship was incredible.

After a couple of tasty beverages and a lovely dinner at a place call Waterside (by the water, funnily enough) we headed back to the B&B for an early night as we were a bit cream crackered.

Sunday wasn’t as good a day weather-wise but stayed dry for the rest of our stay at Taupo except for a minute long shower. We visited a hidden gem of a geo-thermal park called Orakei Korako (‘The Place of Adoring’). To get to it you got a wee boat over the relatively small Lake Ohakuri and then it took about 1.5 hours for a self-guided walking tour. It was quite a sight and also quite a smell - however, as I pointed out to Jo-Ann I’ve produced worse myself….think of an egg sandwich left in a hot room for a week and you’ll get the picture!

We didn’t realise until we’d left that the BBC had filmed parts of their ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ series there. It consisted of bubbling hot springs, gushing geysers (although none of them saw fit to gush while we were there), boiling mud pools and a cave. One of the geysers was amusingly (or not) called the Diamond Geyser…laugh? I nearly paid my license fee….

Then we went to a rather dated Volcanic Activity Centre - the computer aided exhibits were like going back in time to the age of the ZX Spectrum and the Acorn Electron!! Really bad….and the earthquake simulator was totally gash. Not scary at all. We’ll be ready for the big one that they’ve been predicting for years. Not that we want to worry anyone but Wellington sits directly on the fault line where the Asia-Pacific plate is being squeezed under the Australasian plate….rock n’roll!!

At least the videos of the ’95-’96 eruptions of the nearby Mount Ruapehu had some amazing footage in them and they were certainly an interesting watch. Not that we want to worry anyone but Mount Ruapehu is the only ski-field in the world that’s on an active volcano and it’ll be our local this winter!!

The drive back was also 6 hours but at least this time the stop was voluntary - for food in the otherwise desperate town of Taihape.

This weekend we move into our rented flat which, we are informed, is in one of Wellington’s most sought after neighbourhoods?!?!….errr, not for long..! We can’t wait to have our own place where we can put our feet up on the coffee table (if we had one), go to the toilet without locking the door, watch what we want on TV without having to think of our hosts, swear without having to worry about the kids copying us…..all the things you take for granted so easily! We’ve been so lucky to have been able to stay for so long with such good friends and lovely kids in such a great house but we all need our own space and freedom and we can’t wait. And no more getting up at 5:50am for the 1 hour commute to work!! Hurrah!! 17 minute walk to work here I come….

We’ll send some pictures of our place when there’s enough furniture in it to make it look semi-decent…Oh, and as we're moving out of a house with a computer in our room to a flat with no computer (ours should arrive in a couple of weeks) then we'll be even slower than usual to respond to your e-mails....

Stay lucky…

Angus and Jo-Ann

P.S. Feel I should clarify that the police were in fact stopping everyone for compulsory breath tests and it was nerves that got the better of Jo-Ann rather than booze…honestly!

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