More Roto-Vegas (Feb. 4)

First off, it’s kind of hilarious to us that Kiwis like to call Rotorua Roto-Vegas. Although maybe it’s a bit like Vermonters calling Rutland Rut-Vegas. If you’ve been to Vegas, there’s about 0% chance you’d mistake Rotorua (or Rutland for that matter) for it, but maybe they’re just being cheeky here?

Today we did more of the tourist thing and went to Wai-O-Tapu, a slightly overpriced geothermal park south of town where you can see a host of pretty interesting geysers, craters, and other formations caused by the hot water and minerals shooting to the surface from deep underground. While in Rotorua, we felt somewhat compelled to go, though perhaps the Waitangi Day weekend was not the best of timing: the place was packed with other tourists, which was less than awesome.

Geothermal wonders at Wai-O-Tapu

One thing that was pretty awesome was Kerosene Creek, a naturally heated creek near Wai-O-Tapu that is somewhat akin to sitting in a hot tub with a waterfall. And it was free, which as always is the right price for us. We deserved it after overpaying for Wai-O-Tapu, we thought. The owner of the hostel we’re staying at, The Funky Green Voyager (which by the way is an excellent little hostel), warned us that a lot of thefts have occurred there since Lonely Planet, the guidebook that basically every backpacker here has (us included), recommended it in the last edition.

Sorry, ladies, he's already taken

Prior to that Kerosene Creek was a bit of a local secret, which was blown by LP, and subsequently has become the target of unsavory characters looking to take shiny things from people’s cars. Apparently the local uproar has caused LP to remove the portion on Kerosene Creek from the next edition, which hopefully will restore things somewhat. The hostel owner alluded to another similar but largely unknown creek, but was noticeably silent on details about it. Guess they want to keep some secrets to themselves, not that we really can blame them.

Last, we hit the Redwoods park outside of town. They planted a forest of California redwoods here a long time ago (probably 50+), making a scenic reserve with walking paths. Becky had never seen redwoods before, so she was excited to see them. It was quite a nice little park, and we managed to avoid the bus-full of Japanese tourists for the most part, which was a definite plus. If you see a group of Japanese tourists disembarking a bus at a tourist destination, run, don’t walk. The only bummer about this forest was that they don’t have any trees on the scale of the largest ones in Cali yet, so someday we’ll have to visit the originals. Until then, the NZ versions will have to do, not that we’re complaining.

Tree hugger at heart