Day 55, in which we peer at Mabel's Paint Pots

Today we drove north to explore the geothermal wonders of Rotorura, halfway between Mount Doom (which marks the south end of this particular stretch of volcanic activity) and White Island (which marks the northern end, which we're due to visit in a couple of days time).

Our first scheduled stop was Wai-o-tapu, one of the top geothermal visitor spots on the North Island, and we had to floor it (while safely comfortably within the legal speed limit) as I had taken too long over breakfast and the illustrious Lady Knox Geyser only shoots off once a day at 10:15am sharp (this is not an example of Mother Earth's wonderful time keeping. The geyser erupts when a bored looking man pours some soap flakes into the crater, breaking the surface tensions sufficiently to let the super-heated gases below escape. The guidebook reports that this is a tried-and-tested method first discovered by some presumably very surprised female prisoners who had been clearing bush in the area and had stopped at the geyser to do some laundry in the hot spring).

We got there with only seconds to spare. There were about three hundred people straining to look at the geyser, and room for about fifty to do so comfortably. I peered over the shoulder of one man and saw the back of the head of a Japanese lady, and when she bent over slightly to adjust the bag over her shoulder I could see the base of the geyser bubbling as it prepared to erupt. The anticipation was everything, and the power built up slowly – the crater spitting and frothing violently – until finally a seven metre plume of steam erupted from the ground, at which point all three hundred of us had a pretty good view.

Once in full flow, the geyser can keep going for an hour. Figuring there wasn't much more to see, we were first back into the car park and back down the hill to Wai-o-tapu proper. It took a couple of hours to stroll around the 'geothermal wonderland', which presents examples of the different ways the pressure inside the Earth can force its way out to the surface, including a series of huge craters which pockmark the park at random, where acids have eaten away the ground underneath; mud pools and mud volcanoes, which bubbled and spat with varying degrees of violence; and a series of mutli-coloured acid lakes. The latter were the most picturesque, and best of the lot were the Devil's Paint Pots and the Champagne Lake, two huge adjoining lakes streaked in different colours which change everyday according to the minerals which have welled up inside them (for example, sulphur makes yellow, iron makes reddy brown, orange is antimony and purple is manganese). Today the Champagne Lake was vivid orange at the fringes, turning into deep blue abruptly after that, while the Paint Pots were daubed in blots of green and yellow.

We also saw the Devil's Bath, which is a vivid pond which glows a surreal and even shade of Gatorade green. I've noticed it's all Devil's This and Devil's That in places like this, and I wish the early explorers could be more imaginative when naming the things they discover. At Wai-o-tapu we saw the Devil's Paint Pots, the Devil's Bath and the Devil's Home, and we've previously seen two Devil's Staircases, a Devil's Pond and Devil's Bridge. Could we not have, say, Mabel's Paint Pots, Geraldine's Bath and Leslie's Staircase? Hopefully the New Zealand Department of Conservation is reading.

We drove further north to Te Puia, which is technically a Maori culture centre although we skipped all the anthropological nonsense to eat cake and admire more geothermal stuff. This included a geyser which is active 80% of the time and also more powerful than the Knox Geyser, and while this sounds more impressive it did mean the plume was barely visible though the thick steam and mist. We also saw some very neat mud pools which grew in concentric circles, and the usual range of bubbling cauldrons and steaming pits. We also tried to see a kiwi bird, which was housed in its own special aviary, but I guess he was out doing its laundry as it was a very small aviary and we still couldn't see him.

It had been drizzling all day, so we drove home to Taupo to eat pizza and make a sterling effort finish off all of the cider we'd bought earlier in the week.