Rotorua
Rotorua welcomed us with warm puffs of sulphur-air and blazing sunshine. Ridiculously cheap Indian takeaway. Gigantic, surburban, bargain box stores. Veggie udon from a lovely nighttime street market. Street names that sounded like mispronunciations of Harry Potter characters. Our first visit to Pak’n’Save, New Zealand’s amazing discount grocery store, where on a whim I picked up a package of Turkish bread and fell in loooove.
We stayed at the Funky Green Voyager, a place every bit as quirky and laid-back as its name suggests. A cute, friendly, if somewhat architecturally disjointed hostel with a block of buildings that almost formed a complete circle around a central courtyard lined with mazes of fluttering laundry on washing lines. And how nice is this lounge (below)? We only discovered it an hour or two before we left because it wasn’t in the building we stayed in, but you can bet we spent a few quality minutes reading and taking in the space before hitting the road again.
Kuirau Park
The ground in Rotorua is quite literally bursting open with geothermal attractions. There’s a free park conveniently planted right near the main street through town with all sorts of naturally-occurring portals to the molten world beneath the Earth’s crust, where water boils, mud bubbles up, and heat spits angrily from hidden crevices and singes the ground. It chars nearby plants until they turn white and brittle like sticks of chalk. There’s steam everywhere. Steam rising from mounds of rocks. Steam drifting off pools of water. And standing there between the heat of the sun and the heat of the earth made the sun feel as though it was beating down with more intensity than usual. It’s a really radical park. I highly recommend it.
Something about geothermal activity boggles my mind. The fact that molten earth and such intense heat is bubbling and hissing directly beneath the ground we walk everyday makes me realize how amazing it is that our planet supports life. That the earth could ostensibly rupture and burst out at any place and at any moment, but we’re all so used to ordinary existence that we start to believe it’s unshakable. Seeing places like this, where the earth is showing its true nature, puts in perspective how fragile our lives are.
Green finds a way to thrive in most kinds of climates, and this park had some brilliant examples of that. It was a bit of shock to see so much saturated color after coming from the browns of an East Coast US November. A welcome shock :)
Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland
I was still in the mood for glimpsing some hot, angry earth, so I drove on to Wai-o-tapu, a geothermal park. I got to explore a wonderland of hot earth in a neon color palette and walk through some beautiful native bush (that’s “forest” in kiwi-speak).
Fun fact: a lot of plants growing in current-day New Zealand are imported species, but the photo above is what the native bush looks like! Enchantingly beautiful.
This electric green pool was wild.
Whakarewarewa Redwoods
Later that afternoon we went to the redwood forest! We got lost on the way and drove by one of the lakes by mistake, so I guess we can say we visited that too. The redwood forest is not native to New Zealand. Like so many other species of plants and animals here, it was brought over by settlers and is thriving here. That didn’t make it any less impressive. I’ve never been to one before and wow. The trees are just awe-inspiring. I was a miniature person walking among giants. They grow straight up, and up, and up, and not much grows in the cool shade below other than ferns. The ground is a solid bed of orange needles. Their bark is fuzzy and red like orangutan fur.
Redwoods Nightlights
Have you ever had an experience so surreal that it stands out in your memory as separate from your normal timeline? That was this night at the redwood forest for me.
As darkness fell, Kate and I made our way to the Tree Walk area. There’s a system of stairs and suspension bridges built way up in the trees, with lanterns and ambient lights on the trees along the path. We’re traveling on a budget, though, so in the interest of stretching our cash as far as it’ll go, we decided to not buy tickets and instead stayed on the forest floor to see what sights we could grab from down below.
As we crunched through the pine needles and picked our way over fallen branches in the dark, I got the feeling that the world was narrowing in on us, in that moment, following the path of lanterns above our heads. People chattered on the platforms and bridges, moving in crowded lines way above our heads, their footsteps rumbling on wooden planks. They may as well have been in another world. We were invisible in our own private viewing experience. We joked about being gremlins in the dark, outcasts delegated to the shadow worlds, taking our thrills where we could and destined to always look at high society without ever entering it. That’s where my imagination was at, anyway. I felt like I’d been transported into the life of some character in a narrative other than mine. Our under-the-tree-walk experience was better than the paid one, in my opinion, because we had it all to ourselves!
That’s it, friends! There’s so much to see and do in Rotorua but in the three days we spent there, we only got a small, radiant glimpse into what Sulphur Town has to offer. Next stop, glow worm caves!