The Drive

Today we flew from Auckland to Queenstown, self-designated adventure sports capital of the world. Visitors come here to ski, to skydive, to ride in jetboats, and to bungee jump. The town itself is a bustling, crowded mass of restaurants, bars, and souvenir shops - exactly the sort of place we typically avoid. So after we landed (in snow flurries that delayed our arrival) we picked up our rental car and headed out of town. 

We drove a dozen miles up the road to have lunch in Arrowtown, a small restored gold mining town that's no less touristy than Queenstown, but is considerably smaller. After lunch we drove back toward Queenstown to our hotel, located overlooking snowy mountains and the tumbling Shotover River canyon.

With only a couple of daylight hours remaining, we decided to take the wonderful drive out to Glenorchy, where we stayed during our last visit in 2011.  It's renowned as one of the most spectacular drives in New Zealand, which makes it one of the most spectacular drives anywhere on the planet.

The road follows the shoreline of Lake Wakatipu for about 40 kilometers.  At times you're at lake level, at other times you're driving high above the water, winding along a twisting single lane blasted from the cliffs.  Across the spectacularly blue waters of the lake, you're treated to a constant panorama of the peaks of the Humboldt Range.  It's not easy to keep your eyes on the road - and that's my only complaint about the drive: there are very few turnouts where you can safely get off the road and bask in the amazing views.  

Good Little Traveler

Daniel is a great traveler in so many ways. He's endlessly curious, and approaches unknown things with an enthusiastic and non-judgmental attitude. We all love feijoa juice now, which Daniel wanted to try simply because none of us had ever heard of it. Here he is with a kumara burger in a pub near Auckland airport, planning his angle of attack.

Tomorrow morning, we will fly to Queenstown on the South Island.

It's a NZ thing

When you check into a NZ motel, you might or might not get: heat, wifi, hot water, TV reception, or blankets. You will always always get one of these, though.

Beautiful worms.

Today's destination, Waitomo, is a couple of hours from last night's motel, but we left ourselves the whole day to get here. Last night's motel was on the edge of Lake Taupo-- the biggest lake in New Zealand-- so we wanted a little extra time to explore. We found a small, swerving road on the map called "Volcanic Loop," and decided to check it out.

The brush was relatively barren by New Zealand standards, but the volcanoes were gorgeously snow-capped and active, with visible steam fumaroles near their summits. NZ landscapes change quickly, though. One turn, and we found ourselves amid rolling green hills terraced by sheep. Everywhere, sheep.

You're never far from a picnic table in NZ, so we picked up some Brie, crusty bread, and apples, and pulled off the highway for lunch.

We rolled into Waitomo with one purpose: to descend into a cave, board a small boat atop a black subterranean river inhabited by eels, and sail into a damp grotto illuminated by nothing but worms. 

It probably doesn't sound anywhere near as beautiful as it was. Glowworms live on cave ceilings, where they use bioluminescence to attract their prey-- bugs-- into their sticky, threaded snares. In a calm, quiet, black cave, they look like stars.

That picture was taken by a professional, and with a long exposure time. To my iPhone's camera, this cave is pure black.

Before we climbed into our boat, our guide walked us through a section of the cave where the stalactites and stalagmites have formed a natural cathedral-- so beautiful, both visually and acoustically-- that they occasionally hold Christmas concerts underground here. Daniel wished that we'd had the cave to ourselves so he could sing his heart out, but realistically, our group of twelve was as small as it ever gets here. Our guide told us that in the summer, there are usually two hundred people in the cathedral at a time, and over two thousand pass through the caves each day. This is why we travel off-season.

Waiotapu

We left Rotorua this morning for Waiotapu, a dramatic geothermal region with geysers, craters, spurting mud, and noxious, technicolor pools of boiling water.

The Lady Knox Geyser erupts every morning at 10:15, but not because it is faithful. The geyser's period is somewhat unpredictable, so a park ranger gives it a sprinkle of soap powder to break the water's surface tension and move things along on schedule. It's not as grand as Old Faithful or Strokkur, but Lady Knox treated us to a rainbow today.

Since Lady Knox erupts on a schedule, anyone who visits the park in a given day will be at the geyser at 10:15, and then head to the park's main circuit immediately after the water show. Our innkeeper advised us to wait out the crowd by visiting a spectacular but mostly-ignored pool of mud.

We really like boiling mud. It sputters, spurts, and gurgles in a comical way that belies the violent forces that set it in motion. Photo credit: Daniel.

We headed back to the main trail, where most of what we saw looked like the surface of Venus.

The colors, sounds, and odors at Waiotapu are nature's way of saying "keep out," but New Zealand reiterates the point with frequent warning signs like this one. 

We observed enough random, steaming holes in the ground to realize why you don't step off the path here: there's no way to know how much earth there is between your feet and the churning water below. They must have missed the holes.

Getting touristy in Rotorua

When we travel we usually avoid events and attractions that advertise on glossy brochures displayed in hotel lobbies.  This approach generally serves us well, but on this trip we have an enthusiastic 12 year old on board, so we're taking a somewhat different approach.

Yesterday we visited two high-visibility attractions in Rotorua: the Rainbow Springs wildlife park and Mitai Village, a Maori culture-and-dinner show.  Traveling without Daniel we likely would have given both of these attractions a miss, but we went and thoroughly enjoyed both.

Rainbow Springs is most known for its efforts to protect and restore New Zealand's kiwi population.  Although the kiwi is a nocturnal animal, daytime visitors can see them in a specially-designed indoor habitat that artificially replicates nighttime conditions.  Evening visitors can actually see kiwis in a semi-open environment, without any glass barriers between them and the birds.

We were surprised and charmed by these strange creatures. To begin, they are much larger than the robin-sized birds we imagined - the size of chickens! Then there's the whole "no wings" thing, and no tail... just an odd, egg-shaped creature with droopy feathers and a long, narrow bill, patiently scrounging for food in the brush of the enclosure.  Very interesting. We didn't get pics because photography would disturb the birds.

Rainbow Springs also features a number of clear pools filled with gargantuan, obese rainbow trout.  I usually enjoy seeing fish, but these were really kind of revolting, they were so oversized from eating the pellets provided by the park to visitors.

More enjoyable were the various bird exhibits, mostly parrots and similar, uh, birds.  We were all taken by the single African Grey Parrot who softly cooed "Hello" to each of us and made meaningful eye contact. Truly a remarkable bird, and kind of sad to imagine it spending its long life in captivity.

Finally, we took a ride on the park's low-key ride, a rather abbreviated boat trip through New Zealand's natural history, from the Jurassic to current time, ending with a fun plunge and splash.  It's an indication of how remarkably mild the midwinter weather is that we didn't mind getting a bit wet at the end.

After our visit at Rainbow Springs, we headed to the nearby Mitai Village for a Maori cultural show and dinner. 

Farttown, NZ

When we arrived in Rotorua, our innkeeper boasted that you can fart in the middle of a crowd here, and no one will ever know. Steve successfully tested this idea today when he timed his own eruption to coincide with the Earth's.

This morning, we enjoyed the fresher air outside town.