10.02.2007: road trippin' to the black, black water

There was never any doubt in my mind that I'd have to do a road trip during my stay in Auckland. When I was on the South Island in 2003 I got around mostly by hire car, and it was the ideal way to see the scenery. You can stop and get out as often as you like, and just wander off the roadside into the picture postcards that regularly spring up as you round bends in the highway. That was in fact one of my abiding memories of New Zealand, and one of the things that drew me back here: you turn a corner, and the landscape transforms itself completely. Amazing.

So, come the morning of January 27th (day one of a long weekend) I picked up my hire car and we left the Land of The Aucks behind - "we" being myself and about 80,000 certifiably insane retired rally drivers cunningly disguised as Kiwi civilians. I say that because, while the pace of life often seems to be a step slower on this side of the Tasman, the pace of driving definitely isn't. They drive like the frikkin' wind here. And by this I mean that you shouldn't be at all surprised if a Kiwi driver a) changes direction suddenly or b) comes straight at you as if you're not actually there, or c) appears without warning and dogs you the rest of the way to your destination. This last thing is of particular concern. Granted, I'm sure you can experience high-speed tail-gating in just about any country, but here it isn't so much an occasional annoyance as a national sport. Which, quite frankly, irritates the crap out of me.

All bitching aside, though, I braved the onslaught and drove south along Motorway 1 toward a place called Taupo. I didn't really know what to expect there, except that I'd heard it was a beautiful place where you could go black-water rafting. And that was roughly my 'mission' for the weekend: find somewhere pretty and quiet, luxuriate in some NZ nature, and pile down a river in a plastic tube.

I hadn't been behind the wheel for very long when I began to re-discover one of my favourite things about Novaya Zeelandiya. As soon as I escaped the uninteresting outskirts of Auckland, the NZ-ness of the countryside started to show through and make me go "ahhhh", the way happy people do at fireworks. Heading down towards Hamilton - a modest-sized city about 1.5 hours south of where the Aucks live - it was all bucolic pastoral scenes with the occasional steep forested hillside. A bit further south I went through a large-ish town called Tokoroa, and from then on it was all "Gosh, look at that!" terrain. I'd reached the kind of country where you have to stop at regular intervals, get out of your car and take pictures of what you can see from the motorway. In other words, I was finally back in New Zealand.

After some hours of this driving & stopping, checking maps & eating bad bakery food routine, I finally reached Taupo. I wandered into the tourist office to find out about accommodation, walked around a bit and, then, feeling rather impressed by my own decisiveness, I took a snap decision: "Nope, I'm definitely not staying here."

Sorry if you're a) reading this and b) a New Zealander, but to be truthful, Taupo was awful. Ugly, touristy and resorty, roasting hot, full of children dropping ice creams and throngs of way-too-large people guzzling sav blanc at outdoor umbrella tables, waiting for one of those little hand-held bistro doo-hickeys to beep at them, indicating that their $35.00 tempura prawns were ready to be collected and sucked up greedily off their huge faux-Japanese serving plates. Ick. And meanwhile, the lake itself ... well, it was just a lake, really. A big, blue, roundish puddle with great swarms of boats moored around the edges and more way-too-large people slowly flambéting themselves along the shorelines. I know that's harsh, but truthfully that's what I saw. I think maybe I'd been imagining something more like the stunningly clear waters, peaceful shores and eye-bogglingly picturesque surrounds of Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown. Silly me.

Nonetheless, I'm very glad I went to Taupo. As I mentioned, parts of the drive were quite spectacular. But as well as that, from Taupo it was only 80kms to Rotorua, so I decided to go there next - definitely a good decision. And also, on the way out of Taupo I spotted a sign pointing the way up a side road, to a place called 'The Craters of The Moon'. This was, after all, a road trip, so I decided to go with my intrigue and take the turn-off.

Again, good decision.

The Craters of The Moon is what they call a "thermal park" in the Central North Island. That basically means it's an area where the Earth's surface is having some difficulty holding in the stinky effluents and vapours that slosh and whoosh around beneath us all the time. This particular thermal field is a collection of (surprise!) craters. It's a little tricky to describe, but bear with me while I try.

Once you pass the admission hut, a boardwalk takes you through some scrub and you get your first view of the site. To visualise it, maybe imagine you're flying over an African country where about 70% of the land is covered with Acacia forests, and the rest is mud flats. As you fly along, the smoke from clusters of little fires gives away the location of small village communities in the forests. That's a little like how the Craters of the Moon struck me when I first saw it. (And btw, if it seems to you that any resemblance to the actual Moon is rather minimal, you'd be right.)

The vegetation covering the field is very small and low, being mostly club moss and ground-hugging umbrella ferns. From a distance it's quite spiky-looking (hence the Acacia forest analogy). Meanwhile, at numerous points in this slightly trench-warfare-flavoured landscape, thick columns of smoke billow upwards. As you walk along amid this rising smoke, with oozy mud on either side and signs warning you that the mud might collapse &/or scald you if you stray from the path, you begin to get glimpes of where all the thermal activity is coming from. Most of it emanates from the dozen-or-so craters that lie concealed by small depressions in the land, collapsed into picturesque miniature hanging valleys. The rest is being forced out of cracks, fissures and potholes in the Earth's surface.

All around the craters, the mosses and ferns scream at you in violent yellows and greens, while acids and minerals add veins of darker colour to the visual cacophony. But it isn't merely the look of this place that's extreme; the chemical-laden smoke is powerfully hot (not to mention smelly), giving you the sensation of being slowly broiled as you walk. And if the shifting air currents catch you in the wrong place at the wrong time, you get a sudden burst of evil heat - a bit like the rush of warm air that hits you when you open the oven door to get your dinner out. Factor in the gloollup-gloollup sounds of boiling mud and an occasional soft hiss of steam, and you end up with one pretty dog-damn, goat-waxingly surreal environment.

As you might've guessed, I was quite impressed by all of this. It was one of those locations where I find it hard to contain my childish glee, and I actually have to have a little chuckle - much to the bemusement of any other people who happen to be around at the time.

("Why is the beardy man laughing, Dad?")
("Don't worry about him, son. He probably just needs to go and see his special doctor." )
("A brain doctor?")
("Yeah, that's right.")
("Will the brain doctor give him some pills to stop him laughing at rocks?")
("Aye-yup, probably will. Damn, you kids grow up so fast these days.")

Anyway, after an hour or so of wandering the weirdness, I piled back into a scalding-hot car and trundled off in search of the famous Rotorua, home of all manner of dramatic thermal activity. I pulled in there early in the evening, drove around a little and headed to the tourist office (which was impressively open) to find out about black-water rafting and other stuff I could do. The black-water options turned out to be plentiful, but they were all a long way out of town. Still, I grabbed a few brochures and jammed them into my backpack. Then I went off and found a cheap motel, flipped on the TV, learned about Fernando Gonzales' winning streak in the Australian Open, went "Yay Fernando!" for a while ('cause he rocks), and settled down to eat and figure out the next day.

That was all good, but there's a crucial detail I've left out of this part of the story: namely, the stench of Rotorua. The reason why this place is on every tour company's itinerary is that it's absolutely surrounded by thermal fields - so much so that, as you make your way around town, you literally see smoke pouring from the undergrowth. There are city parks with steaming vents in them, lakes with hot mud pools, and a bunch of other weird phenomena, right in the centre of town. And it reeks. Driving in, the sulphur smell permeates the air, getting a little weaker here and a little stronger there, but always present. And you think "Well there you go; all these years of joking about it, and I've finally arrived in Hell".

Anyone who's been walking around a European town and had a sudden whiff of the 'eggy smell' will know what I'm talking about here. It's a strongly unpleasant odour, and it's usually the result of an antiquated sewage system or excavations of very old buildings (I think). But in Rotorua, the whole town smells this way all the time. And the thing is, people live there. Why? Well, I don't really know to be honest, but here's a funny thing about Hell: it's actually quite pretty.

Next morning I headed to a place called Pacific Springs to check out a kiwi conservation program, which was both inspiring and fascinating. I have to say that I absolutely adore kiwi, and my appreciation of them grows each time I meet one. They're a bit like cats, in that you do get your more-or-less generic ones, but then you meet kiwi who are personality-packed; the real 'characters' of the bird world. And of course, I really hope they can survive the tough times they're currently experiencing. So it was great to see how hard some of the humans in NZ are working to make sure that happens.

After that, it was off to see more thermal goodies at a place called Wai-o-Tapu. For some reason, this didn't inspire me quite as much as the Craters of The Moon, even though it's a good deal larger and more active. But it was still very cool. The highlight was probably the 'Champagne Pool', a very large, shallow crater filled with boiling sulphurous water that spills over the lip at one end, creating a bizarre chemical river. The silt and chemicals rise to the top of this river and solidify, so the water actually flows underneath the riverbed and the surface is motionless and sparkly. Weird, eh? But if you follow the course of the river down through the wide valley beneath the Champagne Pool, it gets weirder. At one end of the valley there's a two-metre drop, and what you get at this point is a sulphur waterfall. (And no, I'm not making that up.) It's a real head-trip of a thing to see.

As for the pool itself: it's pretty funky to look at from a distance, and up close even more so. Vast clouds of sulphurous steam rise from it, and the hot winds carry them off in great gusts that blow almost horizontally. If you're, say, thoroughly unhinged, or just a complete masochist, you can walk around to the leeward side of the pool and get lost in the sulphur cloud. So guess what I did ...

Well done: you guessed correctly.

Inside the cloud it was almost unbearable. I had to shield my eyes and my nose, the gusts of wind were strong enough to physically push you around, and the vapour was so hot and acrid, I thought I might either pass out or vomit copiously. Or possibly both. But fortunately neither of those things happened, and it was actually a great 'pointy end of nature' moment. I don't quite know why, but somehow it seems important to have a few of those.

The next stage of the plan was to drive 250kms from Wai-o-Tapu to a place called Waitomo. The tourist office in Rotorua had given me some directions to get there via the back roads, so after I'd had my fill of sulphur and recovered with a big bottle of L&P ('Lemon & Paeroa' - a soft drink that contains one of NZ's endemic fruits), I hopped back into the car and left the thermals behind me. I then proceeded to get ridiculously lost in a region of rolling farmland and huge mound-shaped hills (where L.O.T.R. fans would be saying "Hey, is that where they filmed Weathertop?"), which was so pretty that I didn't really mind being lost in it. And once again, I have to make the following recommendation: if you haven't road-tripped in New Zealand yet, you really, really need to.

Waitomo was my destination because there are karst (i.e. limestone) caves there. Most of you probably know that I'm always up for a good cave, and I'd heard that the ones at Waitomo are quite spectacular. I won't bore you with too much detail about them, because I'm sure you're familiar with the basic idea: go into the cave with a guide, go "ahhhhh" at some beautiful rocks (once again, much in the manner of those engaged in observing quality pyrotechnics), learn a bit about how caves are formed, and take lots of photos that don't turn out very well. It's a thing.

What I will say, though, is this: the settlement nearby the caves at Waitomo is hideous. Don't go there if you can avoid it. I'll also tell you the other reason Waitomo was such a magnet for me: in one of the caves there, you can actually go black-water rafting underground amid decorative limestone formations. So given my 'mission' for the long weekend, how could I not go there?

If I haven't been a total bore in this entry, you'll hopefully now be thinking "So, Anthony, did you end up doing some black-water rafting or not?" And the answer, sadly, is "no". There are two reasons for this. (Aren't there always?)

Number one: I started thinking about why I love caves so much, and what I like to do while I'm in them. Here's what I came up with: basically, I love just being there. Feeling the cool subterranean air currents brush my cheeks, absorbing the quiet and the darkness, and getting up close and personal with the insanely intricate limestone formations, which are one of the purest forms of beauty I've ever experienced. (Only ice and snow compare with limestone in Anthony's Official Register of Natural Beauty.) So caving is mostly a 'quiet awe' kind of thing for me; it's largely an introspective pleasure. Leaping down rapids with a bunch of strangers is a loud, gregarious and probably socially awkward thing for me to do, and while I think it's important to do those things sometimes, limestone caves are definitely not the right venue.

And the other reason? Well, the hostel bed I'd slept in at Waitomo was so phenomenally uncomfortable that my lower back was a macramé knot of searing pain the next morning. So in any case, there was just no way I was good for any challenging physical activities that day :-(

And that's basically the story of my North Island road trip. I'd like to think it won't be the last, because there are so many great destinations here that are theoretically within my reach. Like Napier, for example - an entire town that was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1930s and rebuilt lock, stock & barrel in the prevailing style of the times, which just happened to be art deco. I'd really like to go there and check it out. But we'll see; budgetary issues may yet intervene.

Oh, and speaking of deco, I have to tell you that technically I did spend one night in Auckland as a homeless person. I stayed at the house of two friends, though, and I found a place the next day, so it worked out fine. I thought of that just then because the place I've moved into is a rather elegant art deco villa in an inner suburb called Herne Bay. Thus far I really like it, and I'm much more comfortable here than I was in the last place. In fact, Herne Bay is quite possibly one of the nicest areas I've ever lived in - it's reasonably cute, it's reasonably quiet (but not creepy quiet like Devonport, where I stayed when I first came to Auckland), and it's reasonably close to the 'funky' parts of town. So let that be a lesson to you, kids: when the road beckons, you must obey its call. The practical shit will sort itself out, one way or another.

Thus spake the Word Nerd; I hope you enjoyed. Bye!