Sulphur Central

Sulphur Central
Rotorua, New Zealand

Rotorua, New Zealand

So Rotorua stinks, no really it does, it is like the sulphur capital of the world with so many hot springs popping out of the ground, here there and everywhere that it just stinks. The benefit of this town is that there not much else to do other than to get involved, hop into a stinking hot pool and bubble away absorbing all the goodies that the water has to offer.

So that’s exactly what we did. We arrived in absolutely torrential rain and decided that for our first night we would treat ourselves to the more expensive Top10 campsite which had its own free hot tubs. After our usual debate with reception as to which was the best pitch we found a perfect spot pulled in, plugged in and believe it or not Blondini tripped the power again. We had now worked out that there was some correlation between the shiny new campsite plug in sockets and us tripping them so we gave up our perfectly located pitch and moved to the back of the camp to the old section where the old plug sockets worked perfectly. Note to self, need to find an electrician as this is getting annoying!

Anyway we plugged in, put on our stinky swimwear and hopped into the hot pools, I think that it is safe to say that we had our money worth from this campsite as we got chatting in the hot tub and finally admitted that our skin could absorb no more water 3 hours later.

The next day we took a little trip out of Rotorua to Tirau, for some fresh air and for some big thing selfies. Tirau was pretty cool as almost every shop and business in the town is supporting the local corrugated iron artist and has some random big thing outside or on their roof. The school had a big school bus and even the church had a big shepherd, which Tim is convinced is big Jesus! The main attraction of the town is however the big sheep and big sheepdog which were just awesome and well worth the white knuckle road trip with Blondini being blown to oblivion! For our next random tour, an electric self-drive train car. Yup a company has created these adorable little cars which are electric and run on the old defunct railway lines over the top of Rotorua. It was a pretty nice way to relax just watching the world go by, although I did have the very important job of watching to ensure there were no sheep or cows on the tracks and had to put on the handbrake, twice!

That evening we moved to a cheaper campsite on the outskirts of the town where it certainly smelt a bit fresher and we had a perfect camp pitch overlooking the lake which was full of black swans and we went wild and had $5 dominos pizza, what a life.

Just because we felt that we didn’t quite smell bad enough we opted to try one more set of hot springs, this time the Hells Gate Mud baths. Having heeded all the warnings in all the hot springs so far to ensure you don’t get any of the water or mud in your mouth as there is a very serious danger of contracting Amoebic Meningitis, within seconds of getting in the mud pool Tim decided to hurl a handful of mud at me which landed, yup you guessed it, right in my mouth. Given that I am still here and writing this 6 months behind, thankfully Tim can relax in the knowledge that he didn’t give me hot spring ebola!

Wallowing in the hot mud pools was blissful and then cleaning off and relaxing in the hot springs whilst overlooking the fields of bubbling mud was awesome, we were pretty sad to be leaving, but we really were beginning to small way too bad so it was definitely time to stop wollowing in the sulphur and continue on our journey.

We had one last night in Rotorua and decided to change campsites once more to an even cheaper one, this one was pretty awesome as it had tame wild rabbits running around and sleeping under Blondini. Tim got chatting to a guy who had a pretty cool looking Bus camper. Tim makes it his mission to get a tour of every unusual camper he can so we have spent hours perusing other people’s campers on campsites. After a tour of this guys camper and a good old chat it turned out that he was one of the owners of the campsite. Finally finding someone that might actually know the answer to our mystery electric tripping I asked him if he knew what the problem was. Without even skipping a beat he called over the electrician who was upgrading the bathroom facilities, explained to him our problem and sent him over to Blondini. One screwdriver and 30 seconds later Blondini was fixed and she never tripped another powerpoint! It turned out that we literally needed our Ground to Earth disconnecting, I make that sound like I am really knowledgeable, but in reality it means nothing to me, all I know is that Blondini was now compatible with every campsite in NZ, yay!!

Our final morning in Rotorua we got a text from our friends Marco and Ursala recommending a short walk just a little way around the lake from us. What a great tip this was. The Haumurana Spring was a short but beautiful walk through a redwood forest, probably not that exciting if you have seen the giant US redwoods, but I thought that it was stunning and then we found ourselves looking into the crystal clear waters of the Haumurana Spring. Ww watched on as the trout were circling the spring and fighting the currents that it produces as it pumps out the equivient of 2 olympic sized pools worth of water every day. We were mesmerised just watching it and couldn’t resist but throwing in a lucky coin and watching it fly back up to the surface on the current before whirling back down and eventually landing on one of the rugged ledges. In 1957 divers braved the 10 degrees waters of the spring and recovered more than 5000 pennies some dating back to 1860!

So I think we can declare Rotorua done, we are still smelling like old rope so we may as well head over the Whakatane and the White Island Sulphur volcano.