Waterfalls and Stinky Steam

January 30

Sam:

Today we hiked to a place called Golem’s pool from “Lord of the Rings” and the water was so cold! Golem’s pool is actually a small waterfall with a river at the bottom. Dad dunked himself in the freezing cold river. We also met a Canadian family that were camping around the island. After a while we had to get going, so we walked back to the camper and left.

Charlotte:

Not too far away was a place called National Park village and went to a campsite named KiwiCamp that we stayed over at. KiwiCamp is a big parking lot that if it were busy (which it was not), they can have 200 cars in the parking lot! Also if you were to use a shower you needed to buy KiwiCash, a little keychain with a special code on it. Mom downloaded the app and loaded enough money on it for us all to have showers. The toilets and showers were clean and seemed pretty new. Sam was really excited because there was free WiFi there, too.

Many people stay in this area so they can hike along the Tongariro Alpine Crossing between the three active volcanoes in the area. We weren’t going to do this hike because it takes all day and the weather conditions were very windy, which makes the trail dangerous.

January 31

Charlotte:

We arrived in Taupo and went to the Spa Thermal Park. It is a huge park where you walk along a path until you get to a waterfall area leading into a big river. The waterfall is heated by geothermal energy (from hot springs underground). It was so much warmer than I thought it was going to be! There was also a place where the hot water from the waterfall meets the cold water from the river. My favourite spot was near the waterfalls as the water was starting to cool down just a little bit. Personally I had a great experience there and so did my family. It was nice there and pretty busy. We relaxed in the water for quite awhile.

Sam:

On the advice of some locals, we went to a place called Rose Island to eat our lunch, and we got to watch a bunch of people bungee jump off a giant cliff!

We got back to the camper and drove to a nearby place called “Craters of the Moon”, a geothermic field full of steam vents. It stank because of the sulphur shooting out of the ground in the form of steam so the entire time we were there it smelled like rotten eggs.

There weren’t just steam vents, but there were also boiling mud puddles that reeked! It was really hot out so that made the smell all that much worse, so much so that Charlotte started to feel sick.

After we walked around to all the different geysers, we were starting to get hangry so we drove to a nearby pub called the “Crafty Trout Brewery” and had a snack of big pretzels with butter.