Thursday December 21st, 2006 by Brian
The last three days have been absolute nuts. I try to let the pictures do the talking but I have diarrhea of the typing-hands – sorry! After the weather didn’t cooperate on Sunday for the Tongariro Crossing, we booked ourselves onto a white water rafting trip on the Wairoa river. This is a special opportunity because the river only exists 26 days a year. The rest of the time the water is diverted for hydroelectric power but the government agreed to periodically turn on the spigot so kayakers and rafters could do their thing. It’s exciting because it’s rated Grade 4 and 5 rapids. So what if we’ve never been rafting?
Our guides told us …
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Sunday December 17th, 2006 by Brian
The weather didn’t cooperate meaning we couldn’t do the Tongariro crossing. Instead we cruised out to Orakei Korako which Lonely Planet calls, “possibly the best thermal area left in New Zealand and one of the finest in the world”.
It’s essentially a geothermal area on the edge of Lake Ohakuri with some geysers, silica terraces, mud pools and a cave that they call the Hidden Valley. It was definitely “out of the way” down a number of small secondary roads.
On a side note, modern-day New Zealand has an extremely heavy Maori influence. Although I knew of NZ mostly through famous cities like Auckland, Queenstown, Christchurch and so forth, basically everything else here has a Polynesian-sounding …
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