Sunday saw us bundle into the “truck” and head off to Lake Taupo in one of the many volcanic regions of New Zealand. As I discovered at the Auckland Museum, NZ is pretty much made of volcanoes what it with being on a subduction zone where one tectonic plate slides under another to be turned back into molten rock (which, in turn, pops out of the earth in the middle of the ocean). This area was renound for its hot springs which, as I discovered, mean bits of the hills look like this:
and there are holes like this in the earth:
where water, heated underground by lava, steams into the air. It’s impressive in the summer but in the winter it’s apparently insane. I particularly noted how while some of the hot springs were in conservation areas those that popped up in residential bits were treated in much the same way we might treat a small stream or bog, which makes sense I guess. When the remarkable is all around you it quickly becomes the mundane.
We were staying at the very satisfactory, cheap and quite lovely Tokaanu Lodge Motel where for a reasonable fee you got a pretty spacious, well, house really, and access to their private mineral pools which were quite, quite lovely. We would recommend them.
The owner, name of Blue, took us out on his boat for another reasonable fee and let us drive (drive? Is that right?) it. Here’s a photo of me at the helm, taken by mother.
I drived a bote! It were funs!
The next day was spent up mountain, and I’ll get to that in the next post, and after that we left Taupo, stopping briefly to say farewell to this lovely, clear lake.
