Rotorua, Lake Taupo and Whakapapa

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Tue 26th:
Turned out where we stayed the night before wasn’t all that far from Rotorua, so it didn’t take long to get there. We whizzed through the town and went straight to Wai-O-Topu Thermal Wonderland which is basically a park based around Geo-Thermal activity.

We got there a bit early, so had a cup of tea, and then went in to see Lady Knox Geyser which erupts at 10.15am everyday. But only because Craig the park dude puts soap down the hole to break the surface tension. It was quite impressive to see except for this really really ugly Ginger kid making all this noise. The kind of kid that even the mother has to admit - yeah he’s not the most handsome kid on the playground. He didn’t look quite bad enough for something to be wrong with him, but he was close.

After that we went into the park proper to do the red, orange and yellow walks. We saw loads of stuff but won’t bore you with too much, it’s all in the pictures anyway. The most impressive one was the Champagne pool; 62 metres deep, 65 metres diameter and a surface temp of 74 degrees centigrade. The Bridal veil a river made out of silicon was also cool.

After that awe inspiring adventure we stopped at the mud pools outside to see boiling mud. It spat mud out and was quite cool. Bemused that’s the nearest we could describe the feeling of seeing mud explode.

Then we shot down further south and got to Taupo, which is based on Lake Taupo. We nipped into a McDonald’s to placate Matt as he had just heard another advert for Transformers. It was the coolest McDonald’s ever - It had an airplane outside that you could eat inside, if it weren’t so damn cold. You can also look across the lake at Mordor.
Well Tongariro park which was filmed in Lord of the Rings as Mordor.

So being a bit cold we decided to stop for photos and then make our selves even colder. Yes we drove up a mountain to Tongariro national park, despite the warnings that say ‘Tires must be chained past Car Park 10’. Of course nobody has any idea where carpark 10 was, so we just went anyway and got up to a town called Whakapapa (Pronounced ‘Fa-Kah-Pah-Pah) and found a campsite there. Odd that only English and Scottish campervans were there. Being a bit harrowed by the signs saying that you had to wrap up in hiking boots etc to survive and the fact that we were about 1km from the ski lifts, and that we were on Mordor and Saragon can’t have been far we stayed put. As it turned out that was for the best. The weather had a cold snap and it wasn’t possible for people to do the Tongariro crossing even with a guide.

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