06 – jan 24: rotorua to national park with stop at thermal wonderland

thermal wonderland

after waking up earlier than oleg for the first time so far, i went and uploaded all the photographs that i had. hope you guys enjoyed them!
breakfast was some toasted bread with melted cheese and tomatoes. it all came out kinda half assed cause we were in a hurry, and the bread was totally wrong for toasting. note to ya’ll backpackers – don’t try to be creative. stick to the basics and you’ll be fine. :) sliced bread is a good idea. butter is good and useful and at some point you’ll need to buy salt and sugar (unless you stick to above 80% rated hostels, which at times might be impossible due to fullness or simply lack of such places).

regardless of the uninteresting breakfast we left for our thermal wonderland, which is a huge park full of various geothermal pools that were all created with one sole purpose – making olya choke. i sincerely believe that at some point i just stopped breathing air from the outside and just started using the reserves that saved up between my bones and such. regardless of the suffering (i swear, looking at some of the photos makes me smeel sulfur again, and as i’m writing this 3 days later i can still recall the smells effortlessly while writing about it), the beauty of the park did not disappoint.

what did disappoint was the high advertised geiser that erupts daily at 10:15 thanks to some chemical tinkering (pouring soap into it essentially makes it explode). when you come here avoid the geiser – i shot a video of the whole procedure and it was entirely boring. the uselessness of this experience was made up by us picking up a scottish guy whose ‘mates’ left him at the place and went to play golf as they’ve been to the wonderland before. he ended up needring a ride from the wonderland to the geiser (its about a 5 minute drive but too long of a walk). talking to him was an amusing experience as it reminded me of david, who lived on my floor in maastricht – he was scottish too.

the thermal wonderland was at times boring, at times very pretty, and at times just incredibly weird (think bright radioactive yellow green pool of something, that’s named devil’s ink bowl and looks absolutely deathly, about 2 meters away from you). however one thing was constantly present, is, well, the smell.

hanging out at taupo

after the wonder of the sulfur stench filling the air getting into mountains and lakes was a joy. for me at last, as i wasn’t driving – oleg had his share of fun twists and turns with the german made holden astra.

taupo itself is a “big” city, meaning that we managed to get lost in all 5 streets crossing the main one under my skillful navigation. after a bit of walking we found the take out pizza place we were looking for and found out that its closed before 5 (time was around 2:30pm). since everything else in sight on all 5 streets was faaar too expensive, we ended up eating pizza hut for lunch, under rain.

it is the rain that was the sign of trouble to come. the forecast unfortunately was that all day today, and all day tomorrow it will be raining, windy, gusty, dark, grey, gloomy and the exact opposite of the weather we needed to hike through the mountain range in national park.

arrival to national park

after a few more hours of driving, we arrived to the rainy, windy national park backpackers. this hostel is remarkable for its rock climbing hall, and the view of the 2 volcanoes off the front door step. except i felt tired and sick, and it was raining and cloudy, so i wasn’t up for climbing, and the volcanoes weren’t up for showing their faces.

oleg nevertheless persuaded me to take a lesson for the type of belay that they use (so now i know the ‘real world’ belay type, instead of the gri-gri which is almost fully automatic. this one is really easy and awesome and basic and requires full attention, but very effective, and cheap.), and climb with him. i did two (or three?) very easy climbs before my foot let me know i had enough. i belayed oleg for the next few climbs until he became exhausted, and then enjoyed an insane amount of firefly episodes.

we had a late dinner followed by more firefly and sleep, with hope for a better, sunnier tomorrow that would let us hike through the volcanoes. i was very sceptical about it, since i know that if i think that something will happen it usually won’t :)

lights out were late, around 12.