For those of you wondering where I've been the last three days (nobody noticed? oh well) the answer is: Rotorua. I had an awesome holiday and here are some of the things I did.

Rotorua is a smallish town in a very active geothermal region. A lot of tourists go there to see geysers, boiling mud pools, hot springs and all that sort of thing. Steam comes up through cracks in the footpath and every so often another part of town falls through into a new crater. Nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there.

Anyway. The first day we were there, we went to Waimangu ("Black Water") Valley. This is the only geothermal zone in the world which was created in historical times on a known date (as a byproduct of the Tarawera eruption on June 10, 1886), so it's very interesting to scientists. There's a walkway through the valley so you can see some of the features more or less in safety, though it would be a very stupid thing indeed to leave the path. We only saw a couple of other visitors the whole day, so we had the valley mostly to ourselves.

My favourite was the hot river. It's a surreal thing to be walking along what looks like a perfectly normal, fast-flowing clear river, surrounded by the usual vegetation and bird life, but the river water is hot and acidic. And boiling hot waterfalls are just too weird. It was pouring rain the whole day, but if you got cold there were plenty of "live" rocks around to lean against for a nice warm rest.

The valley is named for the Waimangu Geyser, which blasted boiling black water and rocks 1500 feet into the air for a few years in the early 1900s. They had some old photos of it on display and I'm very glad I wasn't around in those days to see it in action. It killed a few people and wasn't anything like the usual geysers you see around. More like a water volcano.

The second day we climbed Mt Tarawera, one of the sacred mountains of the Te Arawa tribe. It was responsible for radically reshaping the area when it erupted in 1886. The explosion shifted more terrain than Mt St Helens did. The climb to the crater is pretty steep and my legs felt like rubber bands after four hours of hiking, but it was worth it. The mountain split lengthwise in the eruption; the rift looks like a long knife wound in the earth. After the climb, you approach the edge of the rift up a long slope of shifting loose rocks and larger boulders. It was very, very cold, with wet cold clouds blowing through all the time, and the wind was strong enough that it blew me over once or twice. You somehow stagger through all the sliding rocks up to the knife edge of the slope above you, and look over the edge, and there's the rift. It's all red rock and black ash inside. You can go down inside and walk along the crater floor, but it was way too cold up there for us, so we just walked along the edge for an hour or so and then went back down.

It costs NZ $2 to climb the mountain; the Te Arawa Trust maintains the track in a climbable condition in return, so that's fine with me. You get halfway up the mountain, and you find a Te Arawa guy doing tai chi. He stops and picks up a clipboard and notes your name so he can cross you safely off the list again on your way back down. You give him your $2 and in return you get a topographical map of the crater area, a page describing the mountain's history, a thorough description of the conditions at the top, good things to see, suggested routes, and a discourse on how he's been doing tai chi for his health for ten years now and most people think he's about 30 but really he's 45. We learned a great deal about Chinese medicine, too, before we managed to extricate ourselves from the conversation and head for the summit. He was a lovely man.

We also went to Te Wairoa, an excavation of a village that was buried in mud by the eruption. It's fascinating, and they also have a good museum relating to the history of the area. One of the excavated dwellings is the home of the tohunga (I guess that's what would be called a shaman or witch doctor in the USA) of Te Wairoa, who claimed responsibility for the Tarawera eruption. He was 110 years old and was angry that his people were giving in to European influence. He had predicted the eruption, and was buried in his hut along with the rest of Te Wairoa Village, but survived and was dug out alive by European rescuers four days later. Of the 157 people who died in the eruption, 150 were his own people, so he does not appear to have been a very nice old man. ;-) This view was shared by his tribe, who were very angry indeed about the eruption; they tried to prevent his rescue, and he died soon afterwards.

We managed to go see all the lakes in the district except Okataina and Rotoehu. I always like to go to the Blue and Green Lakes lookout when I'm in the area; these are two crater lakes side by side, each in a bowl of mountains and separated by a very narrow, low ridge. One lake is vivid emerald green, the other is sky blue. It's a most beautiful sight to see them together from the dividing ridge. Unfortunately, it was a very rainy, overcast and dull winter's day, so it was more like the Grey and Slightly Less Grey Lakes this time. ;-)

Another interesting thing I hadn't seen on previous trips was Bird's Nest Crater in the Waiotapu thermal region. It's a crater with holes in its walls and birds have nested in them because the heat of the rocks incubates their eggs. The arsenic lake nearby was also quite interesting. Pretty green colour, probably nice and warm, but definitely not a nice place to go swimming.

If any of you come visit me, Rotorua is one of the places I *always* take my overseas visitors. The fact that even the really cheap motels all have geothermally-heated indoor spa pools in every room has nothing to do with it. OK, maybe it does. Outdoor action all day, outrageously decadent luxury afterwards, that's my motto.

Brunnen-"mmmmmmmmmm, hot water"G