The smell wasn't actually as bad as expected, you would notice it only in few areas. The landscape though is really amazing; walking around town you see steam and smoke coming up in between bushes and trees. Even in the public park, in the heart of town, you have bubbling mud pools and fumaroles. We had to go out of town however to see the Lady Knox Geyser and what they call the Geotermal Wonderland: Wai-O-Tapu.
While Lady Knox failed to impress as the geyser starts only as they throw a bar of soap in it (it sounded strange that it goes off every day at 10 am sharp!), the Wai-O-Tapu instead was really a great place to see: lakes and pools with strange colours due to carbon dioxide, sulfides, sulfur, arsenic (and as we liked to joke: some paint that they've thrown in as well); fumaroles, craters, and a quite eerie atmosphere.
Back in Rotorua, being this town also the capital of Maori culture, we went to see a show in Mitai Maori Village, where Maori folks will arrive in a war canoe, welcome you to the village, dance and sing typical songs, including the famous Haka, once used to scare enemies, today simply used to scare opposing rugby teams. After the performance it's Hangi (food traditionally cooked buried in the ground with heated stones) for everybody.
When it comes to the Rotovegas bit, the first crazy activity we did was The Zorb. Imagine 3 people and a couple of buckets of water in a huge inflatable ball rolling and bouncing down a hill. Great craic!
Finbarr & Sharon went extreme to the max doing skydiving as well, while my extreme bit was Waitomo caves.
.JPG)
You can choose between various activities like black water rafting (exploring caves through small rivers floating on an inflated rubber inner tube of a truck tyre) or climbing. My choice was abseiling; that is descending down 100 meters in a cave using some rope contractions.
A bit scary, but great great views. The pic here on the right might give you an idea.. can you see the people there? Once down there you explore the caves around, squeezing in through some very narrow points, crawling and having often as only light the tiny torch on your helmet. The highlight of the trip is seeing the glowworms, hundreds of tiny little worms that glow in the dark to attract insects, creating a fantastic effect: an underground starred sky! A visit to Rotorua would be incomplete without some spa treatment, so I went to another of those volcanic place, even eerier than the first one, and aptly named: Hell's Gate. Again great views
of craters, geysers and bubbling mud, and while I was there I treated myself to a volcanic mud followed by hot mineral pool. After all I had to cheer me up for the fact that Finn & Sharon had left. They went in fact down to the South Island to catch their flight to Rarotonga, while I went back up to Auckland to catch my flight to the next destination (and blog post): Vanuatu.
