Day 5 in New Zealand: Waiotapu and Ruapehu on the Way to Wellington

Another day on vacation, another early wake-up call! 

The kid, at least, was equally unphased by getting up and out at the crack of dawn, because C Watch apparently did its share of middle of the night and wee hours of the morning shifts on board the Robert C. Seamans. And at least when her mom wakes her up on vacation, it's not for standing watch in the cold or monitoring science experiments or scrubbing the deck, but for spending five minutes loading the car and then climbing in to fall back asleep in the comfy backseat.

And that way, we can do my favorite thing to do, which is to be waiting at the front gates of Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland when it opens:

Waiotapu doesn't have a ton of spewing things like Yellowstone does, but I was LOVING how compact all the geothermal wonders were. At Yellowstone you spend a lot of time just getting from place to place, often having to hop in and out of the car and fight traffic, but here, everything exciting was reasonably walkable, with a couple of longer trails that you could opt into to see more exciting things.

I was obsessed with everything that steamed:

Also with collapsed craters and pits where things bubble! 

This one has crude oil in it!

I went into something like a fugue state staring at this bubbling crude oil. It's very mesmerizing:

And then my partner got the kid to ask me to sing the theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies, a show I haven't watched since I was probably nine years old, and I could. I have so many theme songs in my brain in places where there probably ought to be math facts...

My photos are a little disappointing, because what with the clouds and rain coming and going and all the vibrant colors and different kinds of black, I just could not figure out the correct white balance. The ground around these ipu is too grey and when I let the trees be as saturated as they were everything else in the photo freaked out, but otherwise it's not the worst likeness:

The sun came out of the clouds just as I was taking this photo of my family gazing at another ipu and fucked up the contrast, but I'm kind of into it anyway. I just wish I knew why my white balance wouldn't permit anything to be properly green!

Fuck it. Let's just process them in black and white and call it artistic:

My two are over there at the far left, and I'm a billion feet away across Artist's Palette semaphoring at them to stand still and look cute.

There's no saving my white balance, you guys. Just pretend like all these photos come from a very slightly alternate reality, maybe one where the sun is just a little too orange:

See that sign? I TOLD you that a siren longer than 30 seconds meant flee for your life!

Okay, but then I have literally NO idea what mysteries happened with the sky in the next moment, but for some reason all my photos started looking fairly normal. It was still crazy cloudy but it had stopped spitting rain at us, so maybe that made the difference?

Behold, the mineral richness of Champagne Pool that my white balance did not formerly want you to see!

Okay, some of these look weird, too, but I was trying to show how cool everything looked in the fog of steam:

I didn't learn this until later, when I was reading more about the area, but this pool also has a few active but infrequent geysers!

I do remember seeing the geyser pits in the shallow water, but I didn't recognize them for what they were. It would have been so cool to have seen one go off!

The grounds also include numerous collapse craters, almost all delightfully steamy:

Check out that nearly correct white balance. I'm even being allowed to use some green again!

Okay, but this, though? This thermal pool was literally neon green! I have never seen anything natural like it in my life:

We'd been informed that the Lady Knox Geyser erupted at 10:15, so suitably ahead of time the park emptied and we all trekked over and found spots in the grandstand seating. I was SHOCKED when at 10:15 on the dot, a dude came out in tech pants and a high visibility vest and poured a bag of environmentally-friendly soap into the geyser to make it erupt!

To be fair--and historically accurate--I guess the geyser has always been erupted this way? The docent at the microphone said the area used to host a prison camp (which... yikes), and the prisoners would come to this spot to handwash their clothes. Once upon a time, they had the idea to pour soap into the nice pit of hot water, and boom! A geyser was born!

Even the spout around the geyser was created by people piling rocks around the pit to funnel the spray, and silica from the water built up on and around the rocks to mask them and make the geyser look very natural. I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the whole thing, but it is VERY interesting to see how human actions can affect this natural wonder in an interesting, probably harmless way.

It's probably not a great sign that on a day in which we needed to make a six-hour drive we spent the entire morning half an hour from our starting point, but eh. Progress is the enemy of sightseeing!

The drive around Lake Taupo was very pretty, and although my lunchtime sandwich was super sketchy (the entire family shares a singular horror of sloppy sauces, and this was a VERY sloppy sauce...), the cafe where we ordered it was playing "Mr. Brightside," so I got to text my younger kid back at college and tell her so. Wherever you go, there is "Mr. Brightside" to greet you!

We had a couple of little hikes on our wishlist for Tongariro National Park, entirely Lord of the Rings-themed. First, we took the short walk to see Tawhai Falls, one of the filming locations for the scene in which Faramir catches Gollum:

I swear, it's like I still had two feral children with me. Dangerously rushing river, slippery rocks right over the water, and I look around and find everyone gone. One feral child has spotted a beach to grub in and has scrambled down the rocks to get to it--

--and the other feral child thinks he's spotted a better viewpoint, and is in the process of scrambling up the rocks to get to it:

Fortunately, god watches over babies and fools, because everyone made it back to the proper path eventually:

We, however, were not watching our GPS, because not only did we turn the wrong way out of the trailhead, but we did not notice when the GPS took this wrong turn in stride and decided to just map us to what it decided was the closest U-turn... all the way up the mountain to a (thankfully) snow-less ski resort at nearly 1800 meters elevation. 

Just ignore all the many pull-offs, I guess!

This was actually so great, though, and if I'd known what it looked like I would have wanted to make this drive regardless. Look how magical and pretty it is up above the tree line!

Thankfully my partner was a pretty confident New Zealand driver by then, because this road was wild!

Look how close the clouds are!

That fun detour meant that we couldn't do the longer hike I'd planned, but we had time for the quick stop at Mangawhero Falls to see another beautiful waterfall that was also featured in Lord of the Rings:

Driving the rest of the way to Wellington in the dark was worth it!

Tomorrow, we go see Weta Workshop and everything else in Wellington!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!