Rotorua to Auckland

Friday 9th December
We awoke today to sun and heat. No breakfast on the deck this morning though - our room didn't have one. We packed and checked out, and set off to look at another thermal area. We had already visited the biggest and most colourful one on our tour, but this one is slightly different. It is called Hell's Gate, and it has a hot waterfall, which Paul wanted to see. This is it, it looks just like any other waterfall.



The water, however, is at 40 degrees centigrade, which is about the the temperature of a hot shower. It was used by Maori warriors to bathe their wounds after fights.

Local Maori call the area Tikitere. It was named Hell's Gate by George Bernard Shaw when he visited in the early 1900s, and he so impressed the local Maori that from that time they allowed Hell's Gate to be used as the English name. The pools are mostly of muted colours, but the landscape looks more like the moon, it is very bare and dry. I seem, unaccountably, to have forgotten to take a proper overall view of the area, but this should give you an idea. The area round the pools is completely devoid of any vegetation, and everything is shrouded in steam.



There are some very interesting pools. The one below is called The Devil's Cauldron.



Rising steam makes these patterns in the black mud. Black mud has been used for the treatment of rheumatism and arthritis.

One of the most interesting features in the area is the Mud Volcano


It first appeared about 6 years ago, and as it continues to grow, the path has had to be moved. It is the tallest one in New Zealand, and it is still growing. About every 6 weeks or so, when the mud has hardened, the pressure builds up to the point of eruption. It erupts over a large area, so far during the night. We hurried past just in case it decided to do it during the day!

These are the Steaming Cliffs



This is the hottest pool in the park, 122 degrees C at the surface and 144 degrees at 1 meter down. Apparently the boiling activity is constantly changing, and can reach a height of 3 metres. The path does not go too close to this one!

This is the Cooking Pool, which has been used by Maori for hundreds of years to cook their food.



Apparently it has a constant temperature of 98 degrees C and will cook a whole pig in two hours. It is claimed that there is no tainting of the food. I have to say I would need to be pretty desperate for cooked food before I would put it in there!

You can bathe your own feet in the warm mud, and indeed are invited to do so near the entrance.



For some unaccountable reason, I was unable to persuade Paul he would like to do this before we left!

We set off to drive round Lake Rotorua, and managed with some difficulty to take a few views of the Lake. Hamurana Springs was easier to photograph, and also very pretty.




We started along Highway 5 towards Hamilton. The landscape was amazing, so many volcanic cones, some not much bigger than the mud volcano at Hell's Gate, all piled together in a jumble. It was very hard to take photographs, there was nowhere to stop and there were a series of heavy lorries thundering along behind us. My attempts to take photos out of my window resulted in some dreadful language, as trees, bushes, signposts and telegraph poles all jumped into the picture between the time I pressed the button and the time the camera took the picture. I didn't end up with a single picture worth looking at. How can New Zealand name a road Thermal Explorers' Highway and not provide one single spot from which you can explore it? You barely get time to glance at it as you flash past in the car, let alone explore it!

We made a stop at Hamilton so we could look at the gardens, which are famous, and are the town's most popular visitor attraction. We certainly enjoyed them. There is a group of gardens called Paradise Gardens, which we particularly liked. The Japanese Garden was delightful, with a pavilion leading onto a pond.



The Chinese one was also eye-catching, with moon gates, interesting stones, statues, two beautiful bridges over a pond and a pavilion overlooking the river, not many of which features I can get into my picture.



The Indian one was simply stunning, with so many colours of flowers so densely packed together, and two fountains, one in the centre and one under the pavilion. It was very hard to photograph, as several big noisy parties from a tour bus were running about shouting and shoving.



Paul preferred the Renaissance Garden, which was also stunning.




We admired several other gardens, a Maori one, an English one, a herb garden and so on. It was very hot, and I had begun to feel very dehydrated. We walked down a shady path by the Waikato River to cool off.



It was really time to travel on into Auckland. During our journey there, the rain started very heavily, but after a while it went off again. We had chosen a hotel close to the airport, and as I write this I can see planes from the bedroom window. Tomorrow morning we will return the car and then go to the airport to catch the plane to Fiji.

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Katikati to Rotorua

Thursday 8th December
We woke to bright sunlight, which made a nice change. What a shame that the sun waited almost until the day of our departure before showing its face again. After breakfast (on the deck again) we packed and set off for Tauronga. We wanted to find a place called The Historic Village, but I didn't have a good map of the town so was forced to rely on signs. And there weren't any! We found ourselves on the expressway, with no signs even for the city centre. We drove through the industrial area and Port Tauronga, neither of which was very attractive, and eventually headed for Mount Maunganui, which is both a town and a mountain. The mountain is the cone of an extinct volcano. The town is on a long sand spit leading up to the mountain, and has a beach on both sides.



This is the side that faces east, into Tauronga Harbour. The beach here is long, calm and sheltered, and very quiet, as you can see. There are lots of boats as well; this would appear to be the side favoured by the sailors.

The spit is quite narrow so the town itself is long and narrow, only a couple of blocks wide at the foot of the mountain. If you drive across to the west side, the beach is even more beautiful, but quite different.




This is a surf beach, and very popular indeed with surfers. It has about 10 km of very pale beige sand, and there were people surfing all the way along it. It was impossible to find a parking space near the mountain, though there were plenty of empty spaces about half a mile down the beach. Paul got into conversation with a man from England who was visiting his son who had moved here from England. He said when he looked at the weather and the life-style, he could understand why his son preferred this spot to Birmingham, where he used to live.

We were tempted again by the beautiful beach, but once again could not find any public facilities, so we gave up and had another go at finding the Historic Village. This was difficult, because there were no signs to it at all, but eventually I found it. This was mostly because I happened to notice we were driving past 1st Avenue, and its address is 17th Avenue, so we just kept going until we got to 17. I cannot imagine why there are no signs to it. I only knew about it because I saw a tiny advertisement for it in a magazine about the area. Perhaps they don't want tourists to visit - there were certainly very few there, and I wondered how the shops survived with hardly any customers.

The village is a collection of original and replica buildings taken from early Tauranga and set in a village setting.


Many of the buildings are home to local and national community organisations, which I suppose could be why they don't want to market themselves to tourists. Some of the buildings are the studios of local artists, with classes and workshops available, which again are not appropriate for tourists. But I can't imagine how anybody makes a living when the shops have so few customers.

We wandered around for ages admiring the old buildings. I think there may be as many as 70, and I seem to have photographed most of them.




The church was beautiful, though rather hard to photograph, since it is almost completely surrounded by trees.




The church is a composite of several buildings, much of the interior being taken from the private chapel of a converted Maori chief. After his death, the rest of his tribe were not interested in Christianity, and so the decorated rafters and blue panels were given to this church.



This is my best photo of the interior. And yes, that is a woman lying on the floor where the altar ought to be. She lay there for ages photographing the ceiling, and by the time she went, the light wasn't so good.

There was only one building I could find with a historical display inside, the Blacksmith and Wheelwright.



We ate our lunch at a picnic table in wonderful surroundings



but then we spent so long in conversation with the woman in the gem shop that we realised it was past time to leave, or we wouldn't get to Rotorua in time to have another museum visit.

So we set off through steep volcanic hills and a couple of deep gorges. We would have liked to stop for photos, but once again the roads were narrow and twisty, and even driving slowly was dangerous as other road users were liable to be right on your back bumper. Paul kept finding places to pull over to let them pass, but as soon as they were gone, their place was taken by somebody else.

Once we arrived, it was not hard to find the Museum again, and we were able to go and see the bits about the original use of the building, as a spa. This was most interesting, not to say worrying. Invalids of various sorts were encouraged to go there for various baths and other treatments. The waters were felt to be particularly good for rheumatism, gout and arthritis, as well as constipation, obesity, skin and digestive complaints, and various nervous ailments. Talk about a cure-all! It all sounds a bit like snake oil.

You could bathe in the health-giving waters - note the steps to help you get into the bath




or you could have a mud bath




Apparently, all this was very popular. The Baths regularly gave from 60-80 thousand baths a year, and about 30 thousand other treatments. People came to Rotorua for two or three weeks, once or twice a year. Some of the treatments were just massages or special showers. Some sounded awful, involving electric currents being passed through the water. Some involved steaming (somebody commented it was akin to making a person into a hangi; this is a Maori method of steaming food in an earth oven) One awful treatment involved using electricity to heat a rheumatic joint to 300 degrees or more. I would call this cooking, rather than heating.

Towels were very important. You spent some time after your treatment relaxing wrapped in towels, then you dressed and went to spend an hour in the Cooling Room, where you were out of draughts and could cool down gradually.

I went up onto the viewing platform on the roof for a view over Rotorua. This is a view over the town, with the Blue Baths, built in 1915, on the left of the picture, between the two palm trees and partly obscured by one of them.




In the other direction, you can just see Lake Rotorua.



In both pictures, you can see the jolly little decorative turrets. Guidebooks go on about the 'Tudor Style' but I believe when I first saw it I remarked that it looked more Bavarian to me. Sure enough, when I found the section on the building, I found a quotation that it should imitate 'the homely timber buildings of Nauheim (Germany), rather than 'the cold glory of English marble palaces.' I am delighted to have been proved right.

As we were quite tired, we sat down to watch a film we had wanted to see before, about the Maori Battalion in the last war. It was something we knew little about, so we felt we had improved our knowledge a bit.

As it was after 5, we went off to look for somewhere to stay, and are now conveniently in the centre of town. Supper was simple, there was a Thursday Night Market with lots of food stalls. Tomorrow, we have to make our way back to Auckland to return the car on Saturday morning and then catch the plane to Fiji and Samoa.

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Waihi Beach to Katikati

Wednesday 7th December
Today, we haven't moved very much, though we seem to have seen a great deal. It has been another quite grey day, but not at all cold, and fortunately there have only been a few spots of rain.

We didn't get up early, as checkout from the motel where we were staying was not until 11. We didn't delay that long however, as Paul wanted to catch the Goldfields Railway. We walked onto Waihi beach, and it certainly is beautiful - an expanse of sand almost as far as you can see.



The surf is good here, and people were already surfing, in spite of there being no sun and it being just before 10.30.

We drove back to Waihi and the station for the Goldfields Railway. The current railway is part of the original rail link from Paeroa to Waihi which was built in 1905 to serve the Waihi Gold Mining Co. The whole line was closed in 1978, and the Waihi to Waikino section was handed over to the Goldfields Steam Train Society in 1980. (The society later changed its name to Goldfields Railway Inc.) The whole thing is run by volunteers, and is absolutely wonderful.

The station is the relocated and refurbished former Paeroa railway station, and has many period touches.




I would have preferred a steam engine, but today the journey was by diesel engine. The choice for the ride was either a restored 1914 carriage




or an open wagon, giving you a freight's eye view of the countryside. And yes, those are picnic tables in the wagon. The train goes slowly, so standing is fine. They ask you not to sit on the yellow rail round the wagon!



Naturally, we chose to ride in the open wagon, and nobody else did, so we were able to photograph to our heart's content. The train maintains a speed of 5 km an hour until it has left Waihi, when it speeds up to 15 km an hour, so you get good views of the countryside. There are lots of reminders of the volcanic past of this area.



There are only a couple of bridges. This one is the only privately owned railway bridge in New Zealand, and you can see the volunteers are checking it carefully as the train passes. You can see how close this part of the line is to the road. All the local drivers wave and sound their horns as they pass, so you need to do a lot of waving back.




After almost half an hour, we pulled in to Waikino station, on the edge of the Karangahake Gorge.





There is a very nice cafe here for lunch, which you can eat as you wait for the train to take you back again. You don't really get a chance at this time of year to walk anywhere, but once the summer season starts there are several train trips a day, so you could do some of the gorge walks and catch the next train back.

There is obviously somebody with a weird sense of humour at Waikino Station. As you approach, you see a notice which reads
WARNING
Do not read this sign
and that's all it says!

I particularly liked the dog kennel.



There was no sign at all of any guard, or indeed, a dog of any kind. Thinking about it since, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Guard Hut is provided for a cat!

On the way back to Waihi, the engine is just brought round to the other end of the train, so in the open carriage we were right at the front.

Once we were back at Waihi, we got into the car and drove back again because Paul wanted to see the Victoria Battery, another gold stamping battery, but on a much larger scale that the one we saw in Coromandel. In fact, it was the site of the largest quartz crushing plant in Australasia. It was build in 1896 and continued in operation until 1952. It was originally water powered, and later, in 1913, converted to electric power. At that time, it had 200 stamps, and could crush 800 tonnes of ore a day. Before 1900, the ore was roasted after crushing, but after 1900, the process changed. After crushing, coarse gold was removed by machines called vanners, and the remaining fraction was treated with cyanide. The 15 meter high cyanide tanks were housed on the top of this building; you can still see one of the funnels from a cyanide tank, at the right hand side of the photo.



The residue was just washed down the river! The gentleman who gave us a tour of the museum was full of stories he had been told by people who used to work there. Apparently, the cyanide was mixed by hand - though the man who mixed it was given a pair of gloves!

There are plenty of relics of the battery itself - his shows one of the stampers, and some of the rocks it would crush.



This is a life sized model of the molten gold being poured




There are other relics as well. My favourite, Rules for Teachers (1915), is a real hoot, but I can't publish it here because the writing is too small to show up. It contains such gems as 'You must NOT keep company with men' and 'You may NOT loiter downtown in ice-cream stores' or 'You may UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES dye your hair' and 'You must wear AT LEAST TWO petticoats'. I wonder how todays teachers would react to this.!

Here are the cooking arrangements for a single man




I am not too sure what either of my sons would have made of anything like this!

After all this, we made our way to Katikati, a town which is famous for its murals, many of which refer to the history of the town or the history of New Zealand. We photographed quite a few of these. This is probably our favourite, which shows the exterior and interior of the General Store. It is on the wall of the Four Square supermarket.




This one also appealed to me; it shows the first Katakati Post and Telegraph Office



This one honours the Pioneer Kitchen




It was after 5 by the time we had wandered all round the town, so we drove another 10 km and are now staying in a little cottage in the garden of someone who came from England, used to be a Telecoms Engineer and worked very close to where we live in London. It's a small world!

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Coromandel Town to Waihi Beach

Tuesday 6th December
We woke this morning to a very grey and gloomy morning, and while we were eating our breakfast on the deck again, the rain came on very heavily. Fortunately, it didn't last and was only drizzling as we loaded the car and checked out, but it remained very grey and miserable. Any photos I took this morning are very dark and gloomy looking.

We had no desire to sightsee in the rain, so we set off for the other side of the Coromandel Peninsula. The road wound again up through the volcanic hills, and we eventually got a view down to Coromandel Town. You can see how angry the weather looks.



The same lookout gave a view over the east coast of the Peninsula, but that did not look any better



The clouds were very grey and forbidding, and the drizzle continued from time to time. We reached the sea at Whitianga, which had an attractive setting and a lot of expensive boats.



From there, many people will visit Hahei Beach and Hot Water Beach, but since we had seen them, we decided to visit Cooks Beach instead. Cooks Beach is a very small and quiet place with a lovely crescent of sand, and as it had stopped raining, we were able to sit at a picnic table to eat our lunch.



Then we set off for beautiful Tairua, where we had stayed before on our tour. By then, the sun was shining from time to time, and everything looked much more cheerful. We stopped to admire the view at a lookout on the way, across the sea to various islands.




We were able to spend some time in Tairua, appreciating the beauty of the place. There are some very expensive houses, especially those on the extraordinary conical hill.


The water in the bay was the most beautiful blue, and there are plenty of expensive boats as well as expensive houses.



After this, we pressed on towards Whangamata. The volcanic landscape really is remarkable, with the crests so sharp and the hillsides so steep, and so many hills all jumbled together. If they weren't so covered in greenery, you could imagine the volcanic activity was very recent - which I suppose, in geological terms, it is.



Whangamata is famous for being a good surfing beach, so we watched people surfing for some time.



The sun was quite hot, the sky and sea a lovely blue, and Paul was quite tempted to go and have a swim. Then we remembered the lack of showers; this beach is set up for people who go back to a nearby home to shower and change, there is no provision for people who have just gone there for the day. So we decided against swimming.

The next stop was Waihi, to see the Goldfields Railway. Unfortunately, we were too late for it today, so we went to look at the Martha gold mine instead. It is the most enormous hole in the ground.



To give you some idea of the scale, the tiny red specs on the far side of my photo are the gigantic lorries and diggers. And I do mean gigantic - this is one of the retired lorries.



Paul wants to know how you get into it. I assume you need some sort of ladder.

There is a walk right round the hole, which takes around an hour. There are boards with the mine history to look at as well as old buildings or bits of machinery. This was the Cornish Pumphouse, which was built in 1903 to pump water out of the original underground mine. Steam machinery powered the pump at that time, and as the information board mentions that the beam was housed at ground level, I assume it was a beam engine.



The pumphouse was retired in 1913, when the steam was replaced by electricity.

We were quite tired after all this, so went to look for somewhere to stay. Finding Waihi rather full of traffic noise, we opted for Waihi Beach, about 11 km away and much quieter.

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