Lake Taupo 7/9/13
We woke fairly early and made some coffee. The shower in the room was fairly extreme more pressure washer than shower it was fairly invigorating. With daylight we discovered that the room, which had a nice balcony, had a view of the lake which was just next to the front of the hotel. On the drive in we hadn’t seen it at all due to the darkness. We watched a bit of discovery with deadliest catch and sorted ourselves out. Then a program came on that was called “Top Hooker” it was a fishing competition not some sort of organized prostitution challenge. They really should have picked a better name like top angler or something.
First we grabbed a spot of lunch we hit the hotel restaurant which was called the mousetrap. Byrnie had fish and chips which was labeled Fush and Chups. I had a top sirloin junior which was a nice steak some salad chips and an egg.
It was pretty tasty and suitably refueled we headed out to take a look at the lake. It’s an impressively large body of water and we spent a while photographing it and wandering along the shore line. At some points a young child offered to sell Byrnie some chocolate. I warned him not to take sweets from strangers but the lure of chocolatey goodness was too much and he bought a dairy milk crunchy slab. It was fairly tasty and this time it seemed the child had no nefarious intent. Across the road there were some young girls selling kindling so it seemed the have school children sell stuff to strangers system was common.
After a brief exploration of the coast of lake taupo we decided to head back and grab our stuff. We jumped in the car and headed over to the Huka falls a waterfall nearby. The falls were quite impressive not very high but quite violent. The water boiled down there with massive churning amounts of spray. The river that feeds the falls has a lot of hydroelectric power stations and supplys something like 15% of New Zealands total electric energy.
After the falls we headed over to the nearby Craters of the Moon which is a set of steam vents where water heated by magma bellow the surface turns to steam and escapes through a series of cracks and holes creating these plumes of steam. It doesn’t actually look anything like the moon it’s a very green area filled with cracks and holes which emit steam at different rates. Some are tiny little whisps of steam other are great plumes. We enjoyed a walk round the area looking at the bubbling holes and mud craters steam shooting out of cracks in the ground surrounded by sulfur deposits and iron oxide soil. The whole area is very geologically active and as a result it was where they constructed the first geothermal power station.
After a wander round we left via the worlds most armored toilets the doors for which were made of 5mm plate steel for no obvious reason. We headed back to the hotel and had a nice cup of tea edited photos made panoramas etc.
Later on we headed out to get some bits to improve out time lapse camera rig. Google had told us where an electronics store was located so we trekked over only to find google had been lying there was no store there only houses. So we tried further into town at a place called Warehouse a wallmart analogue but it didn’t have the stuff we needed.
So foiled we headed to the barbeque restaurant next door to the hotel. It turned out they did some sort of buffet instead of actual barbeque. The food was actually pretty good if a bit like they had raided the party foods section of the frozen foods aisle of the supermarket. Things like mini samosas, mini spring rolls, onion rings, squid rings, and several others. There was also some duck pieces that were often more bone than meat. Still they also had some pretty good Sushi and some nice fried noodles and barbeque pork. We ate our fill and had some nice beer the name of which I forget Waikto something I think. Byrnie finished off with a bowl of soup which he then regretted. We paid up and headed back did some tinkering on the timelapse and checked our route ready to head for wellington tomorrow.
Hits: 626