Taupo

---

Taupo - 4th November 2008

Got the ferry to Pahia and then the 'Frybrid not Hybrid' taxi to the airport. This runs on oil recycled from the local chip shops! Seems to work ok and you can mix it with diesal if you get caught short.

The plane to Aukland had broken down so I had to wait for a later one, and then get a connecting flight to Rotorua instead of Taupo and be bussed over to Taupo. Air New Zealand will be paying me not to fly with them soon!

Taupo has an enormous lake and is great for fishing - the trout capital of the world! The whole area though is also famed for it's geothermal activity and you can see steaming land with geysers and fumiroles and craters and boiling water and bubbling mud. It all looks rather weird. The small area in Taupo is actually called the Craters of the Moon.

Without a car, it was a bit of a pain getting about but I found a great shuttle service which would drop off and pick up from any of the tourist attractions, (wouldn't bother with Shaun the Prawn at Prawn Park....) which made life a lot easier. Orakei Korako was a geothermal park that could only be accessed by boat. As well as the boiling water, smoke, bubbling mud etc, there were lots of beautiful colours, mostly made by algae. The place had been used for filming certain scenes from the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs series. It was easy to see why.

As well as all the geothermal stuff there are some great waterfalls and rapids in the area. Everyone had said it was great fun to go up to the rapids by jet boat but as the shuttle dropped me off at the falls first it seemed silly to go back again by boat so I'll have to fit that in later.

---

Photos

Orekei Koraki
Africa - so named because of the shape.