Today we got up pretty early. We will visit the Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland near Rotorua. At 10:00am the geyser “Lady Knox” start it´s show. They provoked it with soap so it’s predictable when “Lady Knox” will spit.
After seeing this miracle we went straight to the Thermal Wonderland. It should be New Zealand’s most colorful and diverse volcanic area. And in fact – it is. The area it´s about 18 sq.km and it´s covered with collapsed craters, cold and boiling pools of mud, water and steaming fumaroles. Since 160000 years is this area associated with volcanic activity. The water of the Wai-O-Tapu stream incorporates the minerals of the boiling springs and the volcanic gases what make it impossible to life in.
The wide range of colors in the area due to different mineral elements, the predominate colors being:
Yellow/primrose: sulphur Orange: antimony
White: silica Green: colloidal sulphur/ferrous salts
Red-brown: iron oxide Black: sulphur and carbon
Purple: manganese oxide
Unfortunately you can’t smell how it smelt like – almost like rotten eggs because of the sulphur. Everywhere…
After the trip through the Thermal Wonderland we drove at a place with boiling mud wholeswhich is close by. And then we did the best: We went to a hidden place in the forest (almost only Kiwi-known) and enjoy a real authentic free “Hot Spring”. It was so great I could have stayed for hours in there. It was so hot, felt like in a jacuzzi.
cialis billig Lady Knox & Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland
In the evening I watched a Maori event at the Mitai Maori Village. They made a Maori show, a hangi (it’s there special traditional way of preparing food at hole in the ground) and a night walk through their forest (in NZ we say bush) to see the glow worms and the fish at their lake. The forest remind me on a enchanted fairytale forest. Here the glow worms are blue while in Germany glow worms are kind of white / yellow. I ate so much of the good traditional food that I could not sleep the whole night. Got stomach cramps. It was not easy to do good pictures, had sat in a bad angle.. So sorry for that…
