New Zealand: Visiting an Active Volcanic Island

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Since she made the trip half way around the world, I wanted to show Maria Chiara New Zealand at its most exotic - and prefeably somewhere I had never been myself. Only thanks to a random mention from my uncle did I find out that White Island is a legitimate tourist destination - taking a boat 50 kilometres off the Bay of Plenty coast to visit an active volcano plonked in the middle of the ocean. For days before the trip I nervously checked the metservice website several times a day as the weather report was looking increasingly foreboding. We were lucky: the weather wasn't good enough to warrant a safe journey the day before or the day after - and with Maria Chiara only in New Zealand for seven and a half days we had a one day window. This day the weather was good enough... just.

After leaving the small harbour in Whakatane we had 90 minutes in a boat with about 30 others with White Island looming on the horizon. We were lucky enough to briefly see a pod of dolphins trailing along beside the boat. When I see "we" I actually mean "everyone except me"; I had been staring at the ocean constantly to try to spot dolphins (or seals, or flying fish) when a momentary lapse in concentration brought on by tripping over meant I missed the whole dolphin show but for a single dorsal fin floppong off into the distance.

The Island itself is one large, tall, barren volcano. Once on the island the boat load split off into paries of about ten each with a guide. We were administered with gas masks. At one point the fumes were powerful enough that everybody was making full use of the masks except the guide. We were all too shy to tell her she didn't need to give us the full spiel if it involved her coughing to the point of personal injury! One side of the mountain collapsed meaning that it is easy to walk to the centre of the crater. The thermal activity was like Rotorua on steroids, with ferociously bubbling fumerols and strange clusters of pourous yellow sulphur. The crater was a lake of bubbling water and there were warm rivers so rich in minerals that they would clean a copper coin within a few seconds. It was all very weird and extremely appealing.

Maria Chiara was suitably stunned by New Zealand's noticible lack of people. On her first afternoon we went to Kare Kare (she remembered it from Jane Campion's "Piano") and there couldn't have been more than about 15 people on the entire (large) beach. I had been tipped off about a virtually unknown beach in the Northern Coromandel called Newchums. Once we found it (I won't explain the way, or it won't be "virtually unknown" any more) we had the extreme disappointment to discover that there were at least three other people there!

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Photos

At the carwash
A Samoan carwash crew in Mangere in South Auckland having a very cruisy time.

Oyster catchers
Rob and me

Catches of the day
Seven fish between two fisherman in an hour... good times.