New Zealand Discoverer
Day Thirteen – 9 March 2012 – Day of Earth, Fire, Water and Air.
Weather: Blissful sunshine, 22
It’s so nice to have two nights in one place for a change. I can just leave everything and go.
This morning, breakfast was at the Rotorua Skyline, so we all pile into the bus for the short drive to the gondola that will take us up. We get up to the restaurant which has a wonderful view of Rotorua but the sun is so bright it’s hard to get a decent picture through the glass.
The buffet is pretty good with all the usual stuff plus pancakes!! I didn’t find out about them until after. I’d missed the chef at the end making eggs to order and dishing out pancakes.
I was more interested in the luge.
Yes, if you get a chance, try it. It’s a hoot. Our ticket includes a free luge ride so two of us gobbled up breakfast and made a mad dash out to get it done before the bus left. The track is just a paved wide path with a border that goes most of the way down the hill. The luge is like a plastic toboggan with wheels and a handle bar that you pull back on to brake and go forward to let it move. Perfectly safe. Took a few minutes to get to the bottom then we had to ride an open chair lift back to the top in order to take the gondola back to the bottom.
What goes up, must go down.
When I got to the top, I was greeted by this delightful creature.
That brings the number of cats in New Zealand to two.
Our next stop is the Agrodome for another sheep show. This one was much better than Walter’s Peak. It’s a large stage with two pyramids of steps with a different type of sheep species listed on each step.
The audience seating could probably fit a thousand people easy and had the capability for non-English speakers to put on headphones and hear a translation.
They started the show by bringing out each species and running it up to its proper spot. That’s pretty cool. Merino, of course, is on top. They brought out a total of 19 different types. Then it was on to the shearing demonstration. At the end, when the sheep was laying naked on the floor, the shearer showed how they can shear it without injuring it. In one case, he just touches under it’s hind leg and the leg shoots straight out. He releases, the leg comes in. He touches, the leg goes out.
He assured us that the sheep doesn’t get cold and said that within 12 hours, the skin will start to fatten or toughen up the hide to keep it warm.
The little guy is led off and on comes a cow and you just know what`s coming.
I didn`t. I totally forgot otherwise I would have shot my hand up to volunteer.
He gets four people up there and has fun getting them all to milk the cow. One of our tourmates went up there and as she started, he picked up the tail and started pumping it like a water pump. I have a short video but didn’t realize till later that the microphone was off.
Once they were thoroughly humiliated, the cow was led away and out comes the dogs. What an amazing demonstration. The guy used whistles and words to control the animal. Different tones would get a response. This dog even knows his left from his right and reacts instantly to the commands whether it`s verbal or whistles or hand signals. At one point, he had this dog running in tight circles then slowed him down until he was barely moving, but still moving in a circle.
Then he said he`d show us his herding capability and warned the people in front that sheep like to run and jump off the stage. He goes over to open the door and swings it open fast and everyone in the front row flinches…as three ducks waddle onto the stage. Then the dog does his magic, herding these ducks under the watchful eyes of the sheep sitting on the pyramid steps above it.
Some were sleeping.
I`m wondering if the floor under them is heated.
Once the ducks have been herded back off the stage. The guy shows us another well trained dog, except this one barks.
The sheep are still sleeping.
Then he brings out the first dog too, and both dogs start climbing the pyramid steps – on the backs of the sheep. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down.
And I can`t get We`ll Be Coming `Round the Mountain out of my head.
I took a short soundless video.
Then we go outside where they do a proper sheep herding demonstration on a large show corral where the dog herds the three sheep through two fences, over a bridge and then into a pen. The sheep have done this so many times, they manage most of the feats before the dog gets near them.
Our next stop is Te Puia – the hot springs park. We`re met by a handsome young guide who is doing this for the summer (his mother met us at the bus and passed us off to him). His name is Ed and he took us on the walking trail that goes around the park, starting with the geyser.
This is an area of rock with water gushing almost continuously from the top of a built up area of the rock. The trail moves around it so that we can get the best view without being sprayed with sulphur water.
Yeah, we`re all gonna look 10 years younger tomorrow!
Under a blue sky, the sight is amazing. Lots of water and steam. We get fifteen minutes to take pictures and video that can be viewed here and here.
I walk back to the group and they point to what looks like a natural seating area and one of them says, have a seat.
Silly me.
The rock was hot. Very hot. I sit down and within half a second I blurt out a couple of colourful adjectives and jump to my feet.
Great spot to sit when you’re watching a Winnipeg Blue Bomber’s game in November.
Once the geyser starts to calm down, Ed leads us out onto the trail until we came to some bubbling mud pools. The smell of sulphur is not nearly as bad as I remember it was in Yellowstone. The mud pools don`t smell too back and they actually look pretty inviting.
Next stop is the kiwi bird house. They have two kiwis, a male and female, inside in the dark. Apparently, they believe there are some left in the wild in the area. There are others in the wild in protected areas where predators can be controlled.
We`re not allowed to take pictures inside the house because the birds are nocturnal and our flashes would freak them out. So, we walk inside into complete darkness. Everyone stops cold trying to figure out where to go and when the night vision kicks in, I can find the handle. Inside is a large glass enclosure and Ed points to a kiwi standing right in front of us.
No one can see it.
Then it moves.
Sweet as!
We can see its legs then it moves its head and we can see the beak. These birds are not as small as many thought. It`s about the size of a large chicken. I took this pic in Wellington.
It`s mate also came running along the front of the glass, putting its beak into the soil as it moved. Ed said it plants the worms and insects it likes to eat next to the glass. Otherwise, they`re pretty timid.
So, it`s not even noon and I`ve taken a luge down a hill, watched dogs run on the back of sheep, watch mud bubble and geysers spray and finally seen a kiwi.
And you think the day is over?
Do you think such a morning can be outdone?
Do you think I can outdo river rafting, landing on a glacier, flying over Mt Cook or luging down the side of a hill?
Yes! This is New Zealand. If you can imagine it, they can do it.
Like flying in a helicopter out over the ocean to an active volcano and landing inside the crater for a tour.
I kid you not.
Hey, I gave up the chance to see Hobbiton for this! If someone had told me there would be something so spectacular in Rotorua that I’d give up the chance to do a Lord of the Rings optional, I would have told them…well, sure…if you can land me on an active volcano in the Pacific instead.
This optional is, without exception, the most expensive optional I have ever taken. It’s $762 in New Zealand dollars. That’ll work out to $644.05 in Canadian loonies.
We get an hour rest at the hotel before our transfer is scheduled to arrive. I go back to my room and grab what I need for the flight. It’s a short drive to the dock where the helicopters are sitting on the wharf next to float planes.
There are four of us going and two others taking the float plane. We get our usual pre-flight instruction and we get on the platform to weight us. Then this Newfoundland dog comes in and sits on the platform with us.
Wow. Who knew I’d run into another Newfoundlander here.
Let alone one named Mercedes. She was gorgeous.
Once we severely abuse our Visa cards, we’re led out to the helicopter. The pilot gives us a quick briefing and gives us our life jackets. We don’t have to wear the vests. Just wrap them around our waists and leave the pack they’re in on our bellies.
The helicopter is a five seater. Originally, only three of us were going which meant window seats all around – me and a man with his very English wife (I would have never guessed she was doing it, but she’s an amazing trooper for these adventurous things). The fourth woman, an older pilot herself, was a last minute addition.
The gentleman going with us, and he was a gentleman, let me have the front seat going out. So, we rev on up and then the pilot tells us that he needs to get some fuel. I told him I saw a gas station around the corner.
Oh wait.
So, we take off and cross Lake Rotorua for the airport on the edge of the lake. We land near their hangar and a sky-diving hangar and the pilot says they’re having problems with their pump so he has to try to get fuel out of a smaller tank. So, he runs out and moves a tractor out of the way, runs back and moves the helicopter closer to the hangar, fills her up to about 60%. Before he’s done, the skydivers start falling on the field next to us.
Yeah, guys, if you had come down two minutes earlier, we would have really made your day.
Then the skydivng plane pulls up next to us.
The pilot waves and hopes out – with his own parachute on.
Our multi-tasking pilot gets back aboard and the skydivers now have to hold on to their plane so that we don’t tip it over with our rotor wash. We take off and turn north. (video)
Wooooohoooooo!
We fly over the rest of Lake Rotorua and get a good sense of the caldera that the city sits in. Beyond it are more beautiful lakes and a volcano in the distance. (Mt Tarawera?)
It takes about 20 minutes to cross to the coast where we get a good look at kiwi farms from the air.
Fruit this time. Not the birds.
There’s also hills that look like they’ve been terraced, but it’s a natural volcanic thing. As we get off the coast, the pilot points out Whale Island which was named by Cook because it looks like a whale.
The pilot chuckles and says he gotta love the originality of the English naming things. Then he asks if there are any English aboard. The husband and wife put up their hands. LOL
The pilot then changes the subject and points to some islands to the west and said that on some days you can see the ship that went aground there last year that made the news. It’s still there and they’re offloading the sea containers.
We can see White Island pretty early on. Cook named it because it was always shrouded in a white cloud. Yes. Those original English! Heh.
It wasn’t shrouded in fog today. It was shrouded in glorious sunshine.
We came in from the east and got pictures looking into the crater where it slopes down to the sea. The island was inhabited for some years as they mined sulfur and parts of the mine and their factory remain. The sulfur was used for fertilizer but they found it didn’t work. The mine was abandoned in 1932 and a major cyclone flooded the lower part of the crater and took a lot of the structures with it. A Canadian bought the island and now allows tours to land on it for a small fee. It’s estimated that he makes $4 million a year for nothing. The pilot wonders why he doesn’t invest a small portion just to improve the walkways.
Then again, you might build it up one day and have it turn into a mud pool the next.
We land near three other helicopters and hop out to ooooooooos and ahhhhhhs (video). I really don’t think my pictures capture the magnificence of the area. It’s not a moonscape. It’s another planet altogether. Steam is rising from vents and mud pools. Water too hot to touch flows in streams down to the ocean. The rocks hiss.
The pilot asks us to stand to one side while he ties down the blades and takes our life jackets. Then he pulls out two bags. One has helmets which the owner of the island requires. Granted, if it ever got to a point that we needed a helmet, it would be too late.
Then he pulls out filter masks and shows us how to use it. It’s to filter the sulphur out and we might only need it in a couple spots so we can just put it to our mouths to breath when necessary. It’s pretty windy today and the pilot thinks that we might not need them too much.
Then we set off. The pilot has us walk behind him along a well worn trail.
The rocks and gravel are full of colour from the brilliant sulphur yellow to iron red and lava black. I pick up a few souvenirs. This is one place where I imagine tourists picking up rocks is not a problem. The volcano will replace them all.
We come across our first stream and the pilot tells us that while it isn’t going to hurt us, the high sulfur content of the water can eat away at the rubber in our shoes. We step over the water and the pilot points to a bubbling pool of water just off the stream about the size of three dinner plates. He says there’s two reasons it could be bubbling – one is that it’s bubbling up from the ground and the other is that it’s hot enough to melt the skin off your fingers.
Just to make a point, he touches the water flowing out from the bubbling area. The first two times, he seems to think it’s not so bad. The third time is always the charm….complete with a four letter colourful adjective.
After he has cared for the fourth degree burn on his fingers (heh), he asks us if we have any copper coins.
What? $762 wasn’t enough?
He takes the coins and inserts them into the mud, standing them up so that the water touches half of the coin and he leaves it there for a minute (video). When he takes it out, half the coin looks like it is in mint condition. He said if we left it there for a few weeks, they’d be nicely corroded. He did find a coin that had been left and it was corroded pretty bad. Part of it was green and part of it was black.
We moved on as he talked about the crater walls and the previous eruptions. The last time they had some 4 days warning. Enough for me. We stopped at a mud pool with the bubbling mud and all around us you can hear hissing and bits of steam just coming off the rocks.
This place is alive!!
We walk around with our mouths gapped open – all the easier to swallow mouthfuls of sulfur mist! Every sight and sound just fills your senses. I just hope the short video clips I’ve taken can capture even a portion of it.
We walk up to the edge of the main crater lake (video). The pilot tells us that it has gone down quite a bit which kinda has that voice in the back of my head saying….didn’t that special on Discovery talk about how the crater lake disappearing was a prelude to an eruption?
The area is something few human eyes can see. The shoreline is green and cracked and the lake visible only when the wind pushes the steam away.
Hissing vents are everywhere down there. One step forward is a hundred metre drop at least. There’s enough sulfur around to want to hold the mask up a few times, but it’s not so bad. The wind really does seem to help…you can hear it on the videos.
After snapping off a few million bytes worth of photos, we move on towards the sea, stopping at a couple of large steam vents (video and video) The area is very yellow with the steam coming out of many crusted vents. The pilot leads us across the remains of a molten sulfur stream so that we can get closer to the vent.
The cooled sulfur starts to crack under our feet and the pilot says “now, not too close.”
I back up.
He snickers.
As we continue on, the pilot is full of information on the types of rocks, stopping by a pile that was obviously gathered together as a learning stop on the trail. He showed us the sulfur, iron, a combo of the two, granite and lava etc.
Now I know exactly what I have in my pockets.
We move down to the shoreline which looks like a regular rocky beach.
The area outside the crater on the shore even has greenery on it. The beach is covered with heavily corroded metal bins and machinery from when the mine shut down. When it closed, it just closed and they walked away, even leaving the last pile of sulfur where it was. The buildings had been constructed from concrete but without fresh water on the island they used sea water to make the concrete.
They also used good Canadian cedar. At least, we all agree it’s cedar. The pilot didn’t realize they got as tall as the beams that remained from one of the roofs. He said that when the ships returned empty from Canada after delivering some sulfur, they needed ballast and used the lumber, so they got the best wood in the world to make their roofs.
The wood is actually is pretty good shape considering….cyclones, erupting volcano, constant sulfur exposure.
Now that’s what you want to build your fence from.
The mine was built close to the sea, away from the main part of the crater for safety reasons even though the better sulfur was closer to the crater. Good call, I say.
We walk through the remains of the buildings and the pilot points to some greenery growing near the concrete. It lives off the moisture from the concrete apparently. It’s like a little aloe plant and has fresh water inside, so if we got stuck, you could eat the plant for water.
But the pilot has never tried it. I say go ahead. He says, yeah, that’s what we want, the only helicopter pilot on the island getting poisoned.
Another good call, I say.
We walk to the other shoreline and the pilot tells us it’s safe between there and the helicopter and to take our time walking back while he gets the helicopter ready. No problem, we say.
We take our time and enjoy the last few minutes on this marvel, taking a few more pictures, picking up a couple more rocks. When we get back to the helicopter, the pilot has the two bags out for the helmets and filter masks.
We took off (video) and the pilot gave us a second look at the island before we headed off for the coast. It only took about 20 minutes to get to the coast and we were over Lake Rotorua about 15 minutes later (video). In total, we were gone over three hours and got more than an hour and a half on the island. We landed on the dock (video) and I shook the pilot’s hand to thank him for such a magnificent afternoon.
We got off and he took off, likely returning to the airport for more fuel (video).
The Air Safari company put us into one of their cars and drove us back to the hotel. I thought I’d be wiped but adrenalin was pumping. I went back to my room, emptied my knapsack and went out in search of an ATM, McDonald’s and a t-shirt. I found all three. I went back to my room, bought some internet time to down load the volcano pics and check on everything. I got 100 mb for $12.50 plus ten cents a mb after that. I used 106. (But only paid $12.50 – there’s that math again). By 10:30, I’m ready to slip into a coma.
I fall asleep thinking of the absolute highlight of the day – I actually saw a cat!
Go to Day Fourteen
Go to Table of Contents