down under / nz2

Geyser near Rotorua

Remember that TV advert for NZ butter with the happy, dancing cows and the impossibly green grass and the impossibly blue sky? Well, it’s all true! Well, OK not the dancing bit but the colours here are simply not avaiable in other parts of the world. The air is so clear that even when the sun sets it stays white.
I’ve been up in what Kiwis call Northland, the furthest northern penisinula of North Island, and it’s brilliant, in every sense.
This is where the Maori first arrived, and also the Brits. At Waitangi, in the area they call the Bay of Islands, the treaty between the local Maori and the Brits was signed that set the seal on the colonisation of the islands. The fact that the Maori translation that the tribes agreed to was different from the English version is typical of perfidious Albion and all her works. I visited the house where the treaty was signed, a modest place that was the home of the first British ‘Resident’– there to keep the peace between the locals and the British whose only interest was whaling and gold. The town just across the bay was known then as the ‘Hell-hole of the Pacific’, far more lawless than Dodge City ever was. Darwin, who visited, described the inhabitants as ‘of the lowest sort’, which is rather interesting. Now it’s full of craft shops with a ban on liquor in the streets.
I stayed in a rather smart hotel nearby in Paihia with an excellent restaurant. Have I mentioned the food here? It’s generally of a pretty high standard – lots of local fresh produce, lamb, green lipped mussels, oysters, lots op lovely fish – though they are still a little shy of spices. The bay is spectacular and well worth a visit.
In the extreme north of the island is 90-mile beach, which is exactly what its name implies. Totally empty, you can drive along its length (I didn’t; fearing a breakdown of my hire-car miles from any possibility of contact with the outside world). But it’s fun to com to the end of the road onto the beach and meet a 100km speed limit sign.
I drove back down toward sAuckland through the Waipoua National Forest, which has the best remaining kauri trees. These were much sougt after by Maori and Brit alike and hence mostly cut down by the last century, but there are still some spectacular examples left. The largest is thought to be 2000 years old, 51m high, its trunk with a girth of 15m. I saw it in the midst of a major rainstorm and it was still impressive.
Next up was the Coromandel penisinsula, south east of Auckland. Again the scenery is amazingly beautiful. NZ generally feels like your childhood images of England – before Dutch elm disease and the EU hedge culling policy – but to be honest it is more spectacular than England ever was. Though lumpy. The terrain is definitely lush but lumpy. This is because, though the underlying geology is ancient, it has for the last 25m years or so been lying over one of the most active stretches of the Pacific ‘ring of fire’, the junction of two tectonic plates. So, like Iceland, it is hugely active and entirely covered by ejecta from volcanoes. So things are not so rounded and pacified as England.
I continued down to the area around Rotorua. This is a town on the edge of a huge lake-filled caldera and throughout the town and nearby there are fumaroles and geysers showing the instability and sheer energy just beneath the surface ready to burst out at any time. Many of them are right in the town, which has therefore become a spa with hot mineral and mud baths. There is so much activity that thee town smells of eggs (ammonia/sulphur) or sometimes of burning plastic. There are many volcanic attractions in the area, and I visited 2 of the best: at Whakarewarewa (try saying that 3 times quickly!) in the suburbs, and further south at Waimangu. The first site has a series of boiling mud pools and geysers, one of which reaches 30m in height every hour or so.

Waimangu - in some places the water emerges at boiling point

At Waimangu, the history is extraordinary. Until 120 years ago there were 2 volanoes. The largest had a history of erupting every 2000 years or so. In between there was a lake with superb terraces of hot springs that were NZ’s No 1 tourist attraction. Then one night in 1886 the whole thing was ripped apart, A huge eruption created a split 16km long with craters up to 500m deep along its length, destroying the smaller and ripping a huge gaping hole in the side of the larger volcano. The lake was vaporized and the column of lava, dust and super heated water rose to 15km before falling back as waves of mud which swamped the land for 6km all around, destroying all life. Eventually a new lake formed, much bigger and deeper than before, and the landscape around was re-colonised by plants and animal life. All over the area there are still steam vents and boiling water emerging from the depths. Just below the surface the soil temperature rises rapidly to 100C. No doubt there will be another event there one day.
It makes you feel very small and very helpless to go around an area like this, and realise that we are just the scum on the surface of this raging unstable mass that is the earth.
So back to placid, stable, calm Auckland. But even that is built on a series of volcanoes, some of them very recent. Anyway, tomorrow I’m off to a new continent.
NZ has grown on me. The people are calm and stoic. Perhaps because of what lies so close beneath their feet.