Tuesday, 9 February 2010

Abzorbing pastimes on the Rotorua

I couldn't quite make the road pun work there. Curse you, Supergrass, for setting the bar so high with Road to Rouen.

First stop on the road to Rotorua was a little detour to the Waitomo caves - they have loads of limestone caves and related activities there but we opted for a tour of the Glowworm Cave. The limestone formations are decent but not stunning. At the end of the cave they show you the glowworms, just a few on the ceiling. Then they explain that the worms glow at this stage of their short lifecycle to attract prey which flies into dangling web-like sticky strands - and they turn the lights on to show an amazing number of these strands.
Finally there's a short underground boat ride in pitch darkness apart from thousands of little spots of light on the ceiling. It's really amazing. I used to have some of those luminous stars on my ceiling when I was a kid, but they had nothing on this.

We also stopped off at Otorohanga Kiwi House, which is a must-see if you're interested in, um, fairly drab native birds. (I do it a disservice; it's quite a nice place.) Its main selling point is kiwi birds, rarely seen in the wild. These nocturnal birds are tricked into shuffling about their little habitat in the daytime by careful lighting. I sometimes use the same trick on Lilly.

Then on for 2 nights in Rotorua, in the middle of thermal territory. Every so often you get a big whiff of sulphur. Rotorua lies on the edge of a huge lake, near one volcano that erupted in the 1900s, and along the shore (and in many other non-built-up areas around town) you can see steam vents, bubbling pools of mud or water, etc. For miles around it's not uncommon to see big clouds of steam rising out of the trees. Many of the hotels, including ours, have their own natural hot spring bath - beware if you're wearing silver jewellery, it discolours badly after very short exposure!

There's a museum in the old bath house here, which fills you in on the discovery, eruption etc and the house itself. It's about as entertaining as it could hope to be - the 20-minute video complete with shaking seats fortunately doesn't take itself at all seriously.
For a dedicated look at the hot stuff around here we went to Wai-o-tapu Thermal Wonderland, where you can see the Lady Knox Geyser go off every day at 10:15 like a well-lubricated clock - which it is, the lubricant being a few bars of soap (it was discovered 100 years ago when a convict dropped some soap into a hole at a prison here. It's a bit like dropping Mentos into coke, although I don't know if that was also discovered in jail).
 It can be up to 20m high but I didn't find it all that thrilling. It's too stage-managed, too we-do-this-every-day.
That said, the park has a good array of strange natural occurrences - strange colours abound, including a stunning red-edged lake and a bright yellow-green pool.
 Fortunately, Lilly had recently bought a sulphur-coloured watch for comparison

On the edge of the lake is the Maori village of Ohinemutu, and a church that combines Christian and Maori themes. I'm not one for religious iconography as a rule but they have a very cool (non-stained) glass window here with a picture of Christ (in a Maori cloak). When you kneel in front of it, it looks like he's stepping off the surface of the lake onto the land.
Rotorua and surrounds are also a big holiday destination and, being NZ, that means they're full of ludicrous adventure sports... On Monday we eased into it with a baseball batting cage (Lilly is cross with me because in all the actions shots I took of her she has her eyes closed. Anyone who has photographed her will know this is her natural reaction to being photographed and may not be indicative of the way she hits a baseball).
Then we Zorbed and luged.

This is where Zorbing was invented, apparently - rolling down a hill in a giant hamster ball. You can either slide around inside an inner ball with a bit of water, or - as we did - get strapped in and basically go head over heels down the hill. It's certainly different. Lilly really enjoyed it. I was quite glad to get to the bottom of the hill and bounce off a couple of walls - at least that meant  I'd stopped somersaulting.
 Lilly's zorb run

The luge here is great fun - a minimalist unpowered go-kart and a choice of 3 tracks down a hill-side. I would recommend not following behind Lilly, who got stuck at the top and then drove like an 80-year-old woman who's paranoid about speed cameras*, but it's great fun - shame the skilift back to the top between rides takes so long.
You can really get up some good speed and the course gives you a real feeling that you could easily go flying off the track, and possibly off the hill, at most of the corners.  Lovely views of the lake from the top of the hill, too.

* She enjoyed it a lot more after the first run, when she'd got the hand of it, but that first run did not make her happy - after I eventually overtook her, she was so far behind at the bottom that I was genuinely close to finding a member of staff to ask if they had cameras on the course...

Right, now for a short drive down to Taupo, where I will hopefully throw myself out of a plane! Watch this space...

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