Rotorua, a city built on a big pile of rotten eggs

You’ll smell it before you see it. The general stench of sewers or, even worse, open septic puts welcomes you when entering town. At first I guessed it had to be the tarmac of the new road they were constructing, or one of my tires going into meltdown-modus after hitting the borduur when I got distracted by several steaming holes in a park. I got really wondering where this foul rotting stench was coming from, until I drove past a spa resort covered in a thick steamy damp, and a dozen of rotten eggs exploded into my car. Mystery solved. Rotorua is situated in a geothermal region stretching from the Bay of Plenty to Mount Ruapehu in the south, and so you can enjoy the sulphur stench coming from the hot water pools almost 24H/24H. There are a myriad options to visit parks with a whole array of bubbling mud pools, unnatural colourful sulphur lakes and spurting geysers. You can’t visit everything here, cuz’ that will drain your financial resources. So forget about the smiling faces in the brochures. It’s all superexpensive here and you have to pay literally for everything. So I decided to only visit two of the most famous geothermal parks, Te Puia and Wai-O-Tapu (Sacred Waters), and saw some satanical armageddonical ragnarökal crater entrances leading to mister satan’s little home called Inferno. I didn’t see the geyser in Te Puia erupt, which it should do once or twice an hour. Not today I guessed. In Wai-O-Tapu the Lady Knox geyser erupts at 10h15 every day. Actually there was a trick like I suspected. The geyser stopped erupting like in 1931. So they used soap to invoke an eruption, like prisoners discovered in 1896 when washing themselves in the hot water pool. Soap combined with the chloride decreases the surfacetension of the water, and that’s all the hot steam and water needs to come out its reservoir and erupt in a 20m fountain. The Belgian guy who was sitting next to me was actually thinking about a guy with some sort of mechanical device or putting more coals into it, but no,it’s as simple as soap.

Te Puia

Wai-O-Tapu

More pictures will follow, but the wifi is so slow it took me almost an hour only for these ones Then I set off to Taupo and its expansive lake. Nothing interesting here but crowds who roam the shopping streets or get sunburned on the hot water beach. Underneath the surface hot water pools are hidden so you can enjoy swimming in the lake with a swimming pool temperature or get burned if you choose the wrong spot. The only thing that got my attention were two people who could get a contract for Man Bijt Hond right away. The fat lady wanted to put somebodies head in a stir-fry pan and after that blow his face off with a shotgun. The other guy was a mongol and he considered this pretty funny. Apart from that you have a 5-star restaurant here called Burgerfuel, to fuel extra acid fats into your veins, and drunk wasted ‘kids’ driving around with their pimped cars like in GTA. One such a gang invited me and two other girls at the parking spot to join them in a private hot pool and have some drinks. We came along but got our asses off as quick as possible. Drugs, alcohol, shiny cars and the wrong people is not really my cup of tea. One of these guys was planning to come to Europe in a few months and contact a guy with a lot of money to send a big ship full of drugs. Don’t get busted, I said. Noo, the guy said, I ain’t get busted. No traces won’t lead to me. Nobody will know I talked with that guy. And then at the supermarket he asked me: “what do you wanna drink?”I don’t know, I said, What are you gonna drink?” “I want to get drunk, but nothing special there, not 50 bucks like and getting drunk, but maybe 30. Some beer, spirits, wine.” And another muscled Maori guy, mister Alpha, acting like the alpha male actually, was way to big to handle. And the others had no IQ, to much brain damage I guess. My next stop is going to be Tongariro National Park, to do the famous Tongariro Alpine Crossing in the shadows of Mount Doom. I already know you have to take a shuttle bus to the start of the walk, for which you to have to pay AGAIN, and not less than 30dollars. Damn, pokkeduur, pok-ke-duur. Huka Falls Lake Taupo