canadian_turtle

Mood:

|| Good
Tune : n/a

June 21: In the morning I took the bus from Matamata to Rotorua, it took about an hour or so to get there so it was definitely one of the shorter bus trips I've had during my travels so far. Rotorua is a city that's known because, well, it stinks. I thought people were always exaggerating when describing it, but it really smells horrible. It's located on/around all this volcanic activity and the sulphur gasses erupting from the earth leave behind a disgusting smell of rotten eggs >.< And no matter what I did, the smell still penetrated through and I unfortunately didn't get used to it at all during my time in the city.

Aaaanyway, I had about half a day to explore the city and the first thing I did was figure out what tour I wanted to do the next day. There were several thermal "wonderlands" I could pick from in the area that would show interesting things like erupting geysers and colourful lakes (because of the minerals) and I finally decided on Wai-O-Tapu and made the booking. After that I had a stroll through the city. I saw Rotorua lake (not overly exciting though there were heaps of birds) and sulphur point (stinky, obviously). I walked to the museum (I didn't have time to actually go inside but the building itself was pretty impressive already) and from there to the Government Gardens. Finally I went to Kuirau Park where there are a lot of fenced areas where you could see the gasses lingering just above the ground and bubbling mud pools and such. When I went back to my hostel I found out I had the room to myself that night, which was awesome xD

Sulphur gasses at the shore of Lake Rotorua

The beautiful building that houses the museum

Entrance to Government Gardens

June 22: Since most of the more colourful volcanic evidence is at least an half hours drive outside of Rotorua I booked a trip to Wai-O-Tapu thermal wonderland for today; this included shuttle transfer. On our way to the park we had a brief stop at a location where there was a giant pool/lake/idk filled with bubbling mud and it was awesome to see the mud forming into little hills that exploded into the most fascinating shapes.

The first thing we saw in the park itself was the famous Lady Knox geyser. Underneath the crater there's two different chambers, one filled with hot water and above it one with cold water. The cold water prevents the hot water from erupting but every 24 to 27 hours the two mix and the geyser comes to eruption. Seeing this is now a tourist attraction they manually make the geyser erupt at the same time every day by adding a bit of biological soap into the crater that will force the two waters to mix. At first we thought the geyser was a bit lame as all it did was foam and have a small little eruption, but it got higher and higher until it became quite impressive.

After that the walk through the park took about 1.5 hours and went along bright coloured lakes (green, blue and even a bit of yellow -- all because of the minerals) and fuming craters, despite the smell it was all very awesome.