Next Stop – Opotiki

Saying farewell to our friendly Pop hosts we had one job to do – visit the dump station, then we were on our way.  Another relatively short trip again, just 49kms.  We drove through the very popular seaside town of Ohope, well known for safe swimming and good fishing.  Then through the Cheddar Valley, passing by the famous fish and chip shop on the estuary and Cheddar Valley Pottery.  We can remember coming here with friends Pauline and her late husband Geoff when they collected a very special hand painted platter featuring their motor home some years ago. Lovely coastal views as we drove on to our next stop, Opotiki.

We are here at Island View Holiday Park for an ICA Rally starting Friday but decided to come a little early, as we have a special trip booked for Thursday – more about that next time.    Previous to coming here,  we had get permission to bring our cat Gemma, so she became a “pre approved pet”.  And sign a Dog Policy when we checked in, (yes, we know she is a cat) agreeing to keep Gemma on our own site,  and not walk her around the camp.

 

Keep to the rules Gemma, and you wont need to hide your head

Sign at the camp office

Ours camp  site is great, just a hop, skip and jump to the beach.  As we are a couple of days early, no one else from the ICA group has arrived yet.  I’m sure we will enjoy some beach side solitude.

Island View Holiday Park

At the beach we got a glimpse of the volcanic island Whakaari / White Island, which erupted on 9th December 2019.  There were 47 people on the island at the time. This tragedy left twenty-one people dead, including two who missing and declared dead, and a further twenty-six people suffered injuries, mainly severe burns.  We took a trip out to the island some years ago, it is a weird place with the smell of sulphur in the air, I remember we had to wear hard hats and gas masks.

Whakaari White Island off the coast

Craters of the Moon

This time, on our stop over in Taupo, we are staying at the National Equestrian Centre for three nights.  There are power sites available at reasonable rates, and vans have been coming and going.  Surrounded with lots of mature trees, which means plenty of birdlife around, much to Gemma’s delight.  How she would love to get outside and catch one!

There is a huge indoor arena so I went to see if I could take a peep inside.  No horses being worked inside today, but I’m sure it would be a very busy place when competitions are taking place.

National Equestrian Centre

The rain hardly stopped the previous day, and it was great to awake to blue skies today, so we decided to make the most of it and do some exploring.  First, a trip back to town (Taupo), taking a road which Robin wanted to travel as he wasn’t sure he had driven on it before.  Top up the diesel, and we were good to go.  Taupo is part of the volcanic area in the North Island of New Zealand that has been active for the past two million years and is still highly active. So today we took a walk through the “Craters of the Moon”, a geothermal wonderland, full of steaming craters and vents, roaring steam fumaroles, and bubbling mud.

Boardwalks and graveled paths made walking easy.  It was interesting to see birds and insects flitting around and the ground cover was mostly flowering manuka bushes.There were information boards dotted around, and for the weary (or elderly) plenty of seating to sit and enjoy the views.  There were plenty of tourists wandering about, and it was great to hear their travel stories, where they had been and where they were heading to next.  They seemed to be interested that Kiwis, like us, also like to visit these attractions.

Walking around the track, we heard the roaring of boiling hot steam escaping, and peeping over the edge of the large crater, we could see small pools of liquid mud, plop plopping away. A reminder of just how active and unstable this area is.

Boiling hot steam roaring out

Boiling mud in these small holes

It had been some years since our last visit, and it was certainly worth a return visit, especially since we qualified for senior discount.   Lunch was next, and we took another return visit, this time to Lava Glass, glassblowing, gallery and café.  No photos were allowed to be taken in the gallery, so many beautiful pieces of glass on show, but well out of our budget.  We enjoyed a nice relaxed lunch, then made our way back to the camp.

Tomorrow we are moving on to meet up with the ICA members for their Christmas Rally at Ohakuri Lake.  This will be a new experience for us, our first time meeting this group, and our first time visiting the lake.

To Taupo and Rotorua

Leaving the Leisureline Rally behind, we drove along the 150km Napier-Taupo Road.  Plenty of up and down hills along the way, and Robin was very pleased with how his Jeep performed.  He has already mentioned several times on this trip that our old Landcruiser used to struggle up some of these hills.  The Napier-Taupo Road is reasonably high altitude and can often be closed in winter due to snow. 

We arrived at the Taupo Airport NZMCA Park in time for lunch, unfortunately the resident wasps wanted to join in our meal too.  We spent the afternoon enjoying the warm sunny weather and watching the sky divers jumping out of aeroplanes and come drifting, seemingly effortlessly down.  Only stayed the one night at Taupo, and caught this glorious view from the lookout over Lake Taupo as we left the next morning.

Looking over Lake Taupo

Our stop for the next two nights was Ngongotaha NZMCA Park, in Rotorua.  You know you have arrived in Rotorua when you get the whiff of rotten eggs (sulphur) in the breeze.  Rotorua is a very active thermal area.  Four vans from our caravan club are traveling up to the CCNZ Easter Rally and we lined up together at the back of the park.

Club vans:  Turnbull, Solomon, Benton, Fisk

The weather remained fine and sunny, but definitely much cooler overnight, but it is Autumn, after all.  After doing a little shopping, we stopped off at Kuirau Park and joined the many tourists walking around admiring the hissing, steaming, bubbling vents.  Back in 2001 there was a hydrothermal eruption in Kuirau Park with mud and rocks the size of rugby balls flying in all directions. The rocks snapped branches off nearby trees like they were mere twigs and the nearby road and cars were covered in mud. Keep to the paths, the signs say.

Boiling water under this steam

We will be spending Easter at Mt Maungaui, so do hope that the Easter Bunny comes calling.

Jet Boating on the Wanganui River – Day 3

Day 3 of our Forgotten World Adventure trip started with another hearty breakfast in the motel dining room.  Before we started the long drive home we had another adventure planned – a jet boat ride on the Wanganui River.  What a wonderful experience this was – we had already had a jet boat ride previously, but for some of the other passengers it was their first time.  Our guide was so knowledgeable about the local history and had a folder full of interesting photos.  Wanganui River was the local highway in earlier years, and goods and people were carried up and down the river  before the roads were built.

The safety briefing came next, our group was split into two, and and we were given life jackets to wear.  Not that our guide was planning to tip the boat over, he told us, but a necessary safely precaution.

Once aboard, it was interesting to see that the river was a combination of smooth parts and then many rapids.  Our guide drove the boat expertly around the many large boulders as big as cars in the river, carried down by glaciers, we were told.

The river banks had very interesting geology and our guide pointed out the layers of  mud and limestone from when this part was previously on the ocean floor before being uplifted.  And there was a huge layer of white pumice ash clearly visible on top of the cliffs from the Taupo Eruption which was the most violent eruption known in the world in the last 5000 years. The eruption plume reached 50km into the air, with areas near Lake Taupo being buried in more than 100 metres of pyroclastic flow. This scorching hot flow spread up to 90 km from the vent and covered all local features except Ruapehu. it is possible that ash from this eruption was the cause of red sunsets recorded by the Romans and Chinese at that time.

Interesting features on the river banks

The river views were beautiful, and there was abundant birdlife, flying quickly out of the way of the noisy jet boat, or quietly dabbling around the river edges.  Stopping by a small stream running into the river, complete with a pretty waterfall,  our guide told us the gory tale of  two warring Maori tribes when the stream ran red with blood after a battle.  The area seems so peaceful now.

Pretty river scenes

We  had a great ride, including several “Hamilton Turns” where the boat is turned sharply around before coming to a stop.  The scenery was spectacular and the abundant birdlife showed that the river was in good health.  Then the other half of our group waiting on the river bank finally had their turn in jet boat.  And here they come racing back.

After all that excitement we piled back into the bus and were driven to Laurens Lavender Farm for morning tea, which we enjoyed under the shady awning.  Such a pretty place, so restful, and it must be a marvelous sight when all the lavender is in flower.  And our bus driver Leon told us that he and his bride were married in these lovely surroundings a few years ago.

Laurens Lavender Farm

Then we settled down to the homeward journey, travelling back through National Park.  Stopped at Waiouru at the rather flash public conveniences, designed to mirror the National Army Museum across the road.    The public toilet in Waiouru has been recognized as the best of its kind in the country, and won its category in the 2016 Keep New Zealand Beautiful Awards.

Award winning public loos

One last stop at Taihape and then we settled down with a few nodding off in the bus, till we arrived back in Levin.  What a great three days we had on our Forgotten World Adventure.

Undara Lava Tubes

Catch-up blog again, almost caught up now.  It was a matter of off the train, throw the bags into our rooms, and climb aboard a bus with hardly a minute to spare.  We were off to visit the Undara Lava Tubes.  ‘Undara’ is an Aboriginal word meaning ‘long way’. The park protects one of the longest lava tube cave systems in the world. About 190,000 years ago, a large volcano erupted violently, spewing molten lava over the surrounding landscape. The lava flowed rapidly down a dry riverbed. The top, outer-layer cooled and formed a crust, while the molten lava below drained outwards, leaving behind a series of hollow tubes.

Land owner Gerry Collins believed the best way to protect these dramatic, ancient formations for future generations lay in developing a sustainable visitor experience,to develop a tourist facility to showcase the Lava Tubes located on his family holding, Rosella Plains Station.  Working closely with regional and state government bodies, the Collins family proposed a national park should be gazetted around the caves, and tours to the lava tubes be accessed from a lodge facility managed by the family.   This venture would  lessen the environmental impact but highlight the unique ecology and geology of the cave system and protect the caves for the future.

Access to the caves is by guided tours only, and our guide led the way past an imposing Broadleaf Bottle Tree, the bare branches looking so dramatic against the clear blue sky.  And hiding away in the branches was a tiny little bird, but most of us had trouble spotting it, let along taking it's photo.

Broadleaf Bottle tree

Walking was easy on the boardwalks, although some in our group had been to the caves many years earlier and related how they had to carefully pick their way over rock falls.  The huge size of the lava tubes certainly attest to unknown amounts of lava spewing up from the bowels of the earth.

The Archway

We were all given torches to help negotiate our way through the longer darker caves.  There are various rods dotted around the cave system between the floor and the rock wall to detect movement – just in case.  There was cause for concern some time ago when one of the rods had moved  – was the wall collapsing? Thankfully not, the rod was up against a growing root in the ground which was causing it to move.

Views of the lava tubes

It was a very interesting visit indeed, and we were glad we got to experience it.  I mentioned to our guide that back home in New Zealand we don’t have lava tubes.  But a quick chat with Mr Google once we arrived back in internet range soon told me I was completely wrong.  Check out these sites:  lava cave in the backyard or this one lava tubes in NZ.  New Zealand is dotted with volcanos so no wonder there are tubes and caves hidden under the ground.  But we do wonder why our home grown lava tubes are not better known?