Next we explored the geothermal wonderland that is Rotorua. Seeing a geyser come into life is a good introduction of what’s underneath the city. The Lady Knox Geyser erupts every day at 10.15am, with a bit of human intervention.
From then on it took a couple of minutes to bubble up.
And then burst into life.
Not a bad start to the tour. Certainly don’t see anything like this in Australia.
We turned back from the crater to walk back to the beach. The blue sky and sea made a dramatic contrast to the crater.
Near the beach, we visited the remnants of the old sulphur mine. At the turn of the 20th Century, some very hardy souls tried to mine the deposits of yellow sulphur. Sulphur was used in medicines, as sterilisation, in match heads, and in fertiliser, so they thought there was a buck to be made.
Living on a volcano had its downsides. Food and water had to be brought to the island, however since the Bay of Plenty was frequently rough, supplies weren’t guaranteed. The air quality (as we found out) wasn’t great, and the sulphuric acid ate away at everything. But most crucially, a hundred years ago they didn’t have seismic monitoring and so when part of the rim collapsed in 1914 creating a lahar (a mudflow made up of volcanic material and water) the 10 workers on the island didn’t have a hope. The only survivor was the camp cat, Peter, which was found a few days later. He was appropriately renamed ‘Peter the Great’ and became a local celebrity.
They had another go at mining a few years later, but the amount and quality of sulphur wasn’t great and so mining was abandoned; the buildings and equipment left to corrode in the sulphuric fumes.
We returned to the boat, and on the way back to Whakatane passed by a New Zealand fur seal colony nearby. At least these guys can get away quick smart if the volcano gets twitchy.
The boat sped off back to land, and soon the volcano was once again steaming away in the distance. This was one adventure we won’t forget in a hurry.
We left the relative comfort of the boat and stepped on to a moonscape. This was the earth at its most raw, how it must have looked when it was first born.
All around us were piles of rocks (some of startling hues due to its mineral content), steaming vents, and bubbling mud pools. We were given gas masks as the sulphire dioxide (that stinky egg smell) was sometimes overpowering. We really had to follow our guides carefully as none of us wanted to drown in a pool of hot acid.
The most impressive site was the steaming vent, or series of vents. Even though the steam was caused by seawater pouring into the hot crater and something more noxious, it was still frightening. It was like peering into the depths of hell.
Our visit to White Island was certainly the highlight of the tour. White Island is an active volcano 50km off the coast, in the middle of the Bay of Plenty. There’s not that many places on earth where you can step into the crater of a live volcano so everyone on the tour was excited.
It was an early, pre-dawn start, with breakfast at 5.15am so we could reach the Bay of Plenty town of Whakatane, our departure point. The sun was just rising when the boat passed the sandbar.
The coast was soon behind us as we cruised into the middle of the bay.
It was a bit chilly on deck, but being very prone to seasickness, I’d rather be there than indoors. Luckily the weather was good and the water was quite calm.
We first caught sight of the island about an hour or so into the journey. And the volcano was steaming!
We arrived at the hour-and-a-half mark. With some trepidation, we boarded the rubber zodiacs and approached the island.
What did we find?
When the first of the Lord of the Rings movies came out more than a decade ago, my brother and I were quite enchanted by it all. So when we did a tour of the North Island a few months later, we tried our hardest to find the set for the village of Hobbiton. It’s where the little hobbits (who were half the size of humans) lived their quiet lives. Well, until the wizard Gandalf proposed an adventure.
We heard that it was somewhere near the Waikato town of Matamata, so on our way to Rotorua, we tried driving down the country roads nearby Matamata to find it. The landscape roundabouts was certainly similar to what we saw in the movie, but try as we might, we couldn’t find the movie set.
Nowadays Hobbiton is a part of the North Island tourist route. I was excited to find out that it was part of our tour. Hobbitses! Its entrance is inconspicuous enough.
The tours were all guided, so our tour guide directed our bus down the driveway, past paddocks of sheep (the property is still a working farm).
Until we came to the village…
Yes, it was Hobbiton, with little hobbit holes, lovingly recreated…
Vege patches and a shed…
Beehives and the party tree…
Even a watermill and the Green Dragon pub (serving hobbit-style ales).
Even though everything except the pub were exteriors, the level of detail was astounding. It must have costed a fortune, and from what the tour guide told us it did. Why? Because Peter Jackson, the man behind Lord of the Rings and all of this, was um, obsessed. He wanted to get everything right, especially the details. The tree above Baggins End (Bilbo and Frodo’s place), for example, was constructed from a tree cut down from elsewhere on the farm that he had liked. Because the leaves of the original tree weren’t quite right, he had artificial leaves imported from Taiwan and hand-sewn on!
But the movies made so much money that all the production excesses simply didn’t matter in the end – they recouped the costs half way through the cinema run of the first movie and ended up making a profit many times over. Which is all very un-hobbit-like. Nevertheless, I (and lots of other fans) are glad they decided to open up the village, because I certainly found it delightful.
Being on a geology tour, we had to visit a mine or two. Coromandel is rich in resources. In fact, they had their own gold rush around about the same time as the Australian one in the 19th Century. Nowadays the only kind of mining that’s really viable is the open cut mine. This one in Waihi extracts mostly silver, and it’s actually very small compared to the giant iron ore mines in Australia.
Perhaps there may be a future miner/engineer/geologist among this lot?
Next we took a drive to the Coromandel Peninsula, about 3 hours out of Auckland. The scenery is typical of the Waikato region, rolling farmland with rainforested hills and gorges.
Our destination for the afternoon was Hot Water Beach.
It’s where groundwater heated by all the geothermal action is exposed on the beach. The only tricky thing is that it’s only at one place on the beach that is best accessed at low tide. We got there a bit too late for a hot bath, but it didn’t stop the boys from trying.
I was more entranced by the twilight. It was magical.
We travelled from east coast to west coast in a few hours in Auckland to view some volcanic features. On the calm waters of the east coast at Takapuna Beach, we saw Rangitoto Island, a volcanic that erupted only 500 years ago.
The sand on this beach is sandy at least, and full of shell bits. It’s not a bad place to stroll down, even on a showery day.
The west coast beaches of course were completely different. We visited Muriwai Beach to view the basalt columns on the cliff-face.
With its black sand, biting winds and roaring surf, it was certainly a wild and woolly place.
A few weeks after we returned from Europe via Singapore, we packed our bags again. Hubby was leading a 10 day geology school group tour of the North Island of New Zealand, and I once again tagged along.
It was mid-winter, and Auckland was a bit chilly, although nothing like what it had been in Europe, and showery. We started off by visiting Mt Eden and its extinct volcano crater. Auckland is full of these extinct craters, although these volcanoes oozed rather than exploded.
In the distance we could see other ‘mounds’, which were other volcanoes. Nowadays they are surrounded by suburbia. Luckily they are well and truly extinct!
After lots of deliberation, I finally ventured into crochet, and it’s been fun and really easy. I took a half day course and was able to do the basics with confidence by the end of it. And I was able to crochet things straight off and in quick time. I crocheted this phone cozy for my husband in a day.
And I made some tie-backs for the curtains in a few hours.
And this lap blanket of 25 granny squares was completed within 6 weeks.
My crochet friends all say that it’s more satisfying than knitting, in that crochet is (usually) quicker. Well that’s certainly true as knitting was never this fast. But I still have a soft spot for the needles, but now I can alternate between knitting and crocheting. As they say, variety is the spice of life.
Static and Silence 