Whenever I am asked about where I come from, on mention of the Adelaide Hills most Kiwis say something like 'Oh I couldn't live there with all those bushfires'. It's an understandable fear, I must admit that when I hear the distant sirens ring out in the middle of a 40 degree day with a hot northerly blowing I put the cricket bat down and pause to think about what my bushfire action plan might have been had I cared to have one. But coming from the inhabitants of a land peppered with some of the most active volcanoes in the world I do find it a little incongruous.
Before coming here I was previously unaware of the events of 146 AD. It was in this year that the Chinese heard an awfully loud bang and the Romans noted peculiarly red skies for quite some time. What they saw and heard was the effects of the most catastrophic natural disaster in human history. It was in this year that Taupo (now a sleepy tourist town nestled around an unusually round lake) erupted with ten times the force of Krakatoa, destroying almost everything unfortunate enough to have made this land its home.
Intrigued by these events our little family packed our things into the car and headed south to the place where the Indo-Australian and the Pacific tectonic plates grind over one another with unimaginable force - known to the world as Rotorua, and marketed to the public by NZ Tourism under the misleadingly benign title of the country's premier geothermal wonderland.
Arriving late in the afternoon at a city where steam seemed to rise out of lakes, drains, lawns, cracks in the footpath and small children we decided to shelve our cost cutting plans to cook in our cabin an
d chose instead to eat at the saddest looking Turkish restaurant we could find. This was a mistake. It was only after the event that we found out that all New Zealand eateries have an alphabetic quality code that must be displayed by law near the counter. Assuming that 'A' is the best we must have missed the line of 'Zs' that should have featured in the service area of 'Cafe Istanblue'. Liv, a notoriously slow eater, noticed after a few mouthfuls that the food tasted funny. I, being a notoriously fast eater, gazed at my empty plate in sombre reflection. What followed is better left unsaid except to say that the experience of New Zealand's premier geothermal region is heightened when hot, stinky mud is not just coming out of holes in the ground. It must be noted that a green faced family fronted up at Cafe Istanblerk the next day to provide some much needed customer feedback.Still feeling queezy I visited the local museum where I learnt about the 1896 Tarawera eruption that erased three whole villages from the human gene pool and I was harangued by images of the whole regions impending, if not spectacular doom. Upon asking passing locals whether total annihilation was a genuine threat or just a hyped up tourism device, all seemed strangely evasive and offered no assurances that anywhere in the vicinity was a safe place to be. Bushfires were looking better by the moment. So with an apocalyptic step in our stride we set off for Waimangu National Park - the world's newest geothermal formation.
Hot water. We make tea with it everyday without a second thought, but I can tell you
that when that stuff is pumping out of the ground it is one of the most impressive things around. At Waimangu (which is really the spectacular fallout of the Tarawera eruption) billions of litres of water too hot to drink churns around in enormous lakes, one of which, an opaque blue colour, mysteriously rises and falls 12 metres - 12 metres! And they don't know why! So we were apprehensively impressed as we followed a scalding river down one of the most beautiful and unique valleys on earth.
We were preceded by a group of cheerful monks that helped to lighten the sense of doom.
To the right of this photo flows the aforementioned scalding river.In other news...
I know that it's fashionable for every parent out there to fancy themselves as neo-Freudian child psycho-analysts and present passers by with scads of psycho-babble that prove their child is reaching all the key developmental stages in such an order that proves that they are smarter than everyone else's children. We're not really into that. I prefer to use the animal kingdom to describe where Lucy is at. Currently she is firmly insconsed in the kitten stage. This involves a lot of lying on her back and pawing at anything vaguely interesting within her reach.
New Zealand's seeming oblivion to curious double entendre continues...
Much love and peace (particularly geothermal and gastric peace) to you in your corner of this great planet,
Tim, Liv and Lucy.
