The City of Stench

We saw some pretty cool things in our second day in Rotorua. This was actually the town were my dad was born. We went to see his house but it had been torn down and a new one built in its place (it was a very old house). First thing after leaving the hotel, we played a fun little minigolf game, and even Maia had a go.

Next we went to another Maori place, a Maori town that's open to tourists and guided tours are given there. It's name is longer than supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, so we just called it by its abbreviation, "whaka" (wh is pronounced f in maori). This town was special because it is situated on and in a high geothermal activity area. It was very cool to see all the ways the maori used the the hotpools created there for the past 300+ years. The water is superheated from the magma below. All of the pools were boiling, some quite violently. The average temperature of the pools at the surface was 80-130 degrees Celsius (about 175-265 degrees Fahrenheit), and one pool, the main pool of the town and the hottest one, had a temperature of 200 degrees Celsius (about 390 degrees Fahrenheit). Also, the water is perfectly pure, with several having different healthy minerals naturally dissolved in them. The Maori's there don't have a very high water bill.

That's the main one, its pretty cool looking.



The big box thing in the pic above is called by the children a "Maori Microwave", and that's where they cook their food. Then we saw one of the geysers go off, which was pretty cool, although it was the small one, shooting 3-7 meters (about 10-25 feet). The big one can go up to 60 meters sometimes (about 180 feet).

Oh, and the whole time the place stunk to high heaven. I don't know how these people get used to the smell. Another interesting thing about this place is that it sports the thinnest crust on the earth. Some parts of the earth's crust are only one foot thick here. Tourists were warned to stay on the designated path.Then we saw another cultural experience show, pretty much the same as the night before's (only not quite as good).


After that we went to the park that actually had exploded two weeks before. That made me feel great while we were walking through it. The park was cool though because of all the natural modpots there. For those of you who don't know, mudpots are where gas bubbles up out of the ground through mud, making large comical bubbling mud blops all day long.


You can see by the color of the mud that the sulfur content was high there. And that ended our time in Rotorua.
We drove for a few hours down to Taupo. Maybe sometime I'll show a map with all the places we visited. On the way we stopped to see Huka Falls. That was an impressive sight. At the point before the falls, water goes from a large river to very narrow channel and is dumped off the falls. But its not like a normal waterfall. The water is launched hundreds of feet out. It was the fastest moving and most chaotic water I've ever seen, and it was spectacular. It was also quite scary - if somebody fell in, it is guaranteed they will die.

The batch (vacation house) we were staying in (thanks to great aunt Elizabeth and great uncle Alan) was a block away from Lake Taupo. Lake Taupo is an enormous extremely deep lake that was formed when the volcano it used to be blew itself up thousands of years ago. The explosion was actually the biggest eruption known to man (so I read), and was heard and recorded by people in India and China. Enough ash blew out to cover the entire country of New Zealand 45 meters (150 feet) deep. Now water fills the volcano, and its deep enough that it could be used for submarine activity. There's volcanic rock all around. We went down to throw rocks and check out the lake after dinner. We were quite surprised when the rocks we threw floated on top of the water. We didn't think anybody would believe us, so we took a video the next day. Unfortunately, it was extremely windy the next day. It was kinda hard to actually see the rocks on the camera, but we eventually got it.

I'll try to catch up with the rest of our trip up 'til the present, but we're leaving to the South Island for a week tomorrow, so I might not be able to update until after we get back.
It's really nice being here, but I do miss seeing everybody. Wish you all were here!