Gollum and Mordor

Monday, February 14th.  Drove from Taupo to the Tongariro National Park.  We were pretty excited as we were heading to the infamous Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings films.

 

After checking into our Adventure Lodge motel, we chatted with the friendly motel owner and he gave us some tips for some short hikes for the rest of the afternoon.  And, for you LOTR fans, we finally met one of the stars from the movies!  Here's his picture as proof. (The owner said it was portrait of his mother in law, but I think he was just kidding!!)

Meads Wall

In the afternoon, we visited Meads Wall in Whakapapa ski Village.  Don't remember this from the LOTR movies, but the rock wall involved an important scene with Gollum, apparently.

Will add more to this post later...
Sorry for the delay folks, we've been on the road alot lately and little time to blog or get internet access.

Starting after 4 pm, we hiked the Taranaki Falls trail, a 6K loop that starts near the Chateau Tongariro in Whakapapa Village.  Overall, a pretty easy hike that took us about 1.5 hours. The start of the trail crossed a scrubby, bushy open area that reminded me of scenery in the Okanagan of BC.  Then we suddenly entered this oasis of lush ferny forest that followed the creek.  Most of the trail to the Falls remained in the forest, which gave us some breaks from the hot late afternoon sun.  When we arrived at the Falls, we realized this was a happening place! 
A huge school group of high school age boys had already settled in to the pool at the bottom of the falls, some going for dips.  Needless to say, it was too crowded for us to go down there, but the view of the falls was nice.  To prove that there are stupid people everywhere, a young couple hung out on the rocks just above the falls - it would be easy to slip and fall there - ah, Darwin's law at work. Ironically we saw this same couple among the hundreds on the Tongariro Crossing the next day, AND we saw them a few days later on the ferry from Wellington to Picton!

Rotorua & Lake Taupo: Bubbly things and intro to Maori culture

Sunday, February 13th:
It's been a few days since I've blogged so I'm trying to remember what we've done the last few days - it's been action-packed!  On Sunday we explored the Rotorua/Lake Taupo geothermal region.  We were kinda choosy about what we did as we've already been to Yellowstone and the geysers and pools there are pretty amazing.

The unidentified white birds!

In the morning we toured an art market held in the Government Gardens area in Rotorua, watched some lawn bowlers, and strolled a bit around Lake Rotorua.  They have very friendly black swans there, and some large white birds that look like fat geese to us, have no idea what they actually are (sorry to the birders out there, maybe you can help identify them?)

Then we headed to a living Maori village called (and make sure you say this out loud and replace "Wh" with a "f" sound to say it properly!) - "Whakarewarewa". Check out their website here:

http://www.whakarewarewa.com.   Our Maori guide, nicknamed Annie, was excellent, and told us about the residents' everyday life.  The steam cooking methods are really interesting - they just place their roasts and vegetables, even puddings, inside their geothermal cook ovens outside their homes, and the ovens work like slow cookers, almost never overcooking the food!  Annie said that the villagers share the ovens and often the meals as well.  They also bathe in some of the warm pools there, which are steaming all around their homes.  Some of their relatives lived through the Mt Tarawera eruption in the late 1880's, which destroyed several villages closer to the volcano.  We also checked out their cultural performance in the afternoon, and saw our first "Haka" dance, the warrior dance, where the guys stick out their tongues and try to look threatening.  Our performers were more funny than scary though :)

Back on the road heading south to Lake Taupo, we stopped at another geothermal hotspot, the Waimangu Volcano Valley.  From here, we got a spot on view of Mt Tarawera, which erupted in 1886 and created the Waimangu Volcanic Valley - the youngest geothermal spot in the world. The largest geyser in the world, the Waimangu Geyser also erupted in 1900 and killed a few visitors in 1904.  Barry and I both felt a little uneasy as we walked through this steaming, bubbling valley, as we had witnessed a rare major eruption of the Steamboat geyser in Yellowstone in about 2005. It hadn't erupted for several years and freaked us all out! 
 Anyway, nothing like that happened on this day, thankfully!  On to Lake Taupo, a huge caldera lake created after a giant volcanic eruption thousands of years ago.  Man, you just can't escape volcanos in New Zealand!

Had a great supper in Taupo, looking out over the lake. It is as big as an inland sea, and we watched a beautiful sunset there.  Our suppers were delicious - had steak grilled on a super heated lava stone - yum!