Today we started the morning with the short drive back to Wai-O-Tapu from our campground. This site is famous because of the high concentration of geothermal activity in a relatively small area.

We made it just in time to watch them induce the geyser to do it’s morning show; shooting hot water about 2m into the air. They dump soap into it to lower the surface tension of the water so it’ll perform on command; makes for good tourism, although I wouldn’t classify it as a natural wonder.

So after this we went to the park proper, and did the several kilometer long walk around the park. There were some people around, but no where near the crowds you’d see at a US national park, which was wonderful. Plus, most of them are speaking other languages, so are easy to tune out 🙂

I (Mel) have never been to a volcanic/geothermal area before, and Eli’s only been to volcanic areas, so this was all new stuff for us, and was really amazing. It didn’t smell too bad, so we could take our time and enjoy the sights. Everything was so many colors; orange from antimony, yellow from sulfur (they spell it sulphur here), red/brown from iron oxides, black from carbon, etc. There were geysers, mud pools, hot springs, thermal pools, geothermal lakes, craters… all manner of new things to see. They had great pathways that took you right next to all these things.  We took about a zillion pictures (or rather, I did since Eli was feeling lousy).  Here are just a few.  We also took some great videos of bubbling mud, but they’re too big to upload for now.  We have a 1GB cap for the entire time we’re here, so I’m trying to ration my picture/video uploads (hard job!).

You can’t quite tell, but the lake is green, teal, and yellow in different patches. I can’t remember the name right now (10 minutes to catch the ferry!), but it’s got a bunch of thermal springs and upwelling-type things into it that bring in the colored minerals.

The color doesn’t show up well on our netbook, but this lake is NEON yellow.  Bright, almost blindingly yellow from all the sulfur in it. It was right next to these great yellow sulfur caves.

This is a lame picture of boiling mud. These pits are so cool; huge pits of mud with air bubbling up all through them, making them look like they’re boiling with bits of super-hot mud shooting everywhere. I took some good videos of it that we’ll upload later.

We drove south all the way to Wellington after this, so we could get really good sleep in before catching the ferry. Along the way, we drove past some snow covered mountains, which I think are near Tongariro, where we are going to hike on our way back north.

Today we got up at a sane hour, since Eli’s started to feel under the weather (congested, tired, and achy). It’s a good thing we had a relaxed day planned.

There’s a hotspot under Rotorua, which makes it very geothermally active, and a great place to see all sorts of great geology. Even feeling lousy, Eli enjoyed himself here.

We started with a tour of a modern-day Mauri village, the native people to this area. They lived in these areas originally, cooking their food in the thermal vents, and bathing and cooking in the thermal pools. And treating their skin regularly with the mud from the mud pools!  Below is a picture of them cooking their corn for dinner in one of the pools in their village. The village itself is one of their ancestral villages, and members of the tribe still live there, but it’s been modernized in many ways, so resembles a cross between an ancestral and modern village.

Cooking corn in a thermal pool

After our village tour, we went back to Rotorua to get a tour of the Jade factory, and watch them make Jade pieces. Unfortunately, our tour company got confused, and the jade-maker takes Sundays off, so we had to miss this tour. But we did watch a video on Jade carving, and browsed their shop. Then we wandered around the district a while, and stopped at a craft fair. It was exactly like craft fairs on the Cape, with retired folks selling nice hand-made stuff for prices that were way too low 🙂  Unfortunately, we doubted our ability to get pottery home safely, with 10 more days in NZ and 5 more flights, because they had some beautiful pieces. We also took a walk around a large lake in the area, through a wetland where we saw lots of great birds.

Our final activity of the night was a Maori village demonstration and dinner. This was at a different “village”, which was specially created to mimic the look and layout of their ancestral villages. We got to see the ritual for visiting tribes, and a show of native songs and dances. Then they served us a buffet dinner that was cooked below ground in the traditional manner, which was quite tasty and reminiscent of Thanksgiving dinner (potatoes, sweet potatoes, chicken, lamb, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce…). Then we wandered around the village before heading back. Our tour guide was a hoot, and we did karaoke on the busride back (with lots of Christmas carols).  I (Mel) decided that Maori wood figures are nearly as good as gargoyles, and photographed some. Interestingly, many had their tongues sticking out, which was a sign of something or other… if it was sticking out crooked it was a sign of welcome.

After all this excitement, we drove for a while toward Wai-o-tomo, but it didn’t end up having anywhere to stay! So we drove onward until we found a caravan park, and stayed their for the night.

Since today was supposed to be a gloomy day, we decided it would be the perfect day to visit the glow-worm caves in Waitomo. They are completely tourist-ized, but as such are a quite safe way to see these New Zealand natives. The glow worms are actually larvae for the fungus midge. The midges sit on the ceiling, and drop sticky threads to catch food. The light they emit lights up their thread and attracts prey.

We chose to do a ‘blackwater rafting’ trip, where you have an inner tube, and you tube down the river inside the cave, looking up in the dark at the glow-worm colonies. We were in the cave for about an hour with a group of 12 folks and 3 guides. We spent a bit of time hiking in the cave, then the guides helped us over some small waterfalls, before we peacefully floated through the rest of the cave, checking out the ‘worms’.  It was a little like looking up into the night sky with no light pollution, except these worms were brighter and there were a lot more of them. It was really great; not just the worms, but also the caving. It was over much too quickly, and we took a short hike out of the forest back to the vans.

We ordered the picture CD from the tour company, and it has some great photos on it, including some of us in the cave (in our adorable hard hats and wetsuits… the water was 12°C!). However, it’s a CD, and our netbook doesn’t have a CD drive, so we can’t upload those pictures until we get home.  But in the meantime, we also took a hike around the caves, and took a picture of the stream coming out of one.

After all this caving and exploring, we got back in the van and drove to our next destination, Rotorua. It’s a geothermally active area, but fortunately our campsite was far enough out of town that it didn’t smell like sulfur all night!

On the way, we stopped at the Kiwi house. It was closed 🙁 but we took a picture with the giant kiwi statue anyhow!

After we finished our dive day (and hung out with our British friends until midnight), we slept in, then drove south. We made a stop-off at Sheepworld, to ferret out the reason behind the pink sheep, and see a little of what they had to offer.

We got there just in time for their daily show. We got to see one of their sheephandlers go through the routine with the dogs, rounding up and herding the sheep. Those dogs are amazing!  Then he had people from the audience help him with some demonstrations. There were only 5 of us, so we all got to participate. First, a woman from Europe had to separate the sheep out by color; she had a rough time of it. Then her husband and I (Mel) got to try our hand at shearing a sheep. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, since he held it down for us, but I did come away smelling like a sheep. Also, as soon as you touch their wool, your hands are covered in lanolin, which makes them silky smooth. Then we got to feed some lambs, and see lambs in various colors.

At this point, it was pouring out, so we grabbed umbrellas and toured the grounds to check out the other animals they keep there, and hung out in the shop for a while, waiting for the rain to stop. Since it didn’t, we dashed to the car after a bit, and continued our drive south. We made it south of Auckland to Hamilton at a reasonable hour, and stopped there for the night, with the plan of checking the weather in the AM before planning the next few days.

Oh, and the mystery of the pink sheep. The farm hands had dyed a small group of sheep red and blue, which are the colors of the local rugby team, before a rugby match a while back. They used vegetable dye, which washes right out and doesn’t hurt the wool or sheep. Their boss came back and got upset with them, and made them wash it out. So the next time he left, as a practical joke, they dyed a group neon pink and put them in the pen at the entrance to the park. The boss got back and was very upset, until he started getting calls from his neighbors, saying what a clever marketing scheme he’d come up with.  Apparently, so many people were stopping to photograph the sheep, that the neighbors noticed! They also got higher ticket sales from the extra people brought in. So now they keep some pink sheep around as their signature 🙂

First off, I apologize for the lack of updates recently. First of all, internet access is spotty at many of the parks where we are camping, and in some, prohibitively expensive. Second, I (Eli) have, as predicted, gotten good and sick. We’ve had to cancel our planned Tongariro Alpine Crossing hike for today, and instead moved our Cook Straight Ferry reservation up to 1PM. We’ll have a relaxing day crossing the straight and driving part-way to the glaciers on the South Island.

Anyhow, the Poor Knights. We went diving with Dive! Tutukaka, which is the largest operation heading out to the Poor Knights. Our group was great, just a captain and 2 crew, with about 12 divers. Several of the divers had big time photography gear with them, which was a first for any of my trips. The first site we headed out to is called “The Tunnel” or the “Eastern Arch”. Its a large archway/tunnel through the island, and had a huge school of pink snapper swimming in the middle of it when we arrived. The diving was fantastic! Tons of snapper, blue and pink mau mau, large short- and long-tailed stingrays, and all sorts of fish were cruising up and down the walls and floor of the tunnel. Once we finished that dive, we had lunch and a cruise about the islands, stopping at the world’s largest sea cave (by volume) Riko Riko Cave. After lunch, we headed out to the Northern Arch for a second dive. Mel and I went out alone this time, and spotted a ton of great sea life. She spotted a Moray Eel hiding in the rocks, and there were bunches of nudibranchs on the vertical walls.

All in all, the Poor Knights was by far the best temperate diving I’ve ever done.  Mel seconds this, emphatically.

We also made friends with a couple from Australia, Nicky and Brian. We spent a bit of time chatting with them afterward, and they provided us with some information about their itinerary. That was immensely helpful, and helped us limit ours to something reasonable.

The Poor Knights themselves were beautiful, rocky islands with all sorts of arches and outcroppings, like the one above. One of our dives was through an arch like this, and in between dives they took us around in the boat to look at the islands themselves while we had our lunch.

We didn’t have an underwater camera, so us on the boat with the islands in the background is the closest we could get.  We’ve got some more pictures which we’ll upload to the photo site later. It was an amazing day!