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Published: March 14th 2016
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Another glorious sunny day dawns so I make use of my free morning with a saunter around the little peninsula that sticks out into the lake at Rotorua. I start at the busy end where there are people queuing for boat trips, helicopter rides and water plane rides. The shore side is heaving with little black teal with golden eyes which I find out are New Zealand Scaup or Papa go. There are some odd looking black swans in amongst the teal with smatterings of red around their beaks.
I've noticed a few geocaches are hidden along this part of the lakeside so hope I get to find my furthest from home ever cache today. The walk takes me through pretty woodland and where it's boggy there's a boardwalk. Reading the slightly knackered interpretive panels I find out the lake has suffered the same eutrophocation our Broads have, with similar reasons stated, sewage and farm pesticides and fertilisers messing up the delicate ecosystem. They've started to sort it out so hopefully there will be improvements.
I can't find the first cache easily and there are too many people about to be scrabbling about off the edge of the boardwalk
so I carry on towards the point of the peninsula, Motutara Point, I see some odd looking moorhens plodding about on the grassed area. They are huge and have blue chests. They turn out not to be moor hens but purple swamp hens (close enough!). They look pretty menacing so I steer clear and go look for another geocache in a tree. It's disguised in a piece of branch made to look like part of the tree, sneaky. My first cache in New Zealand. Result!
On an interpretation panel there's a Maori story set at the lake about some guy called Tutanekai and some beauteous wench called Hinemoa. It's the usual families at war so the lovers have to meet in secret and nearly die crossing the lake to see each other. Eventually all ends well, the couple wed and the families make peace with each other.
Moving round the the of the peninsula I find myself next to the Sulphur Bay I'd seen from my thermal pool wallowing. There are lots of birds out on the rocks - cormorants, pied shags (black and white), black swans, New Zealand Scaup and various types of gull. The colour of
the water is very chalky greeny-blue from the sulphur.
I see the very silly 'yellow duck' bus come boat tourist thing. I'm guessing it drives straight into the water and floats. Luckily the path around the lake disappears into some trees and I manage to avoid them.
I get to a thermal area and find one bubbling pool is called Cameron's Laughing Gas Pool. Apparently the Rotorua Morning Post in1931said 'a hot pool, the gases emitted from which banished the deepest gloom in peal after peal of laughter.' The mixture of gases produced something similar to dentists' laughing gas. There's lots of steam arising from the rocks in this area - so very strange for those not used to seeing such sights on a walk round a lake!
I finish my morning with a picnic sat outside the very pretty museum building. It used to be known as The Bath House and was New Zealand government's first major investment in tourism, creating a spa facility for visitors to Rotorua from 1908 until 1966. Unfortunately I don't quite have enough time to have a look around inside so go back to the knitting covered tree I'd seen the
day before and pick up a geocache I hadn't realised was there at the time.
What a lovely morning in Rotorua. Next on my itinerary is a trip to Hobbiton Movie Set...
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