Nearly Neutral Travel

We returned to Auckland on a trusty InterCity coach, and while these aren’t exactly tour buses, I’ve come to appreciate the freestyle commentary that some of the drivers take great pride in imparting along the route. Today’s driver Brian, however, gave by far the longest and most irrelevant spiel of all, which covered topics such as: yesterday’s weather, the seat belt configuration on buses other than the one on which we were riding, and how to load luggage on to subsequent connecting buses. He did his best to maintain order and keep to schedule on a very busy route, but we could tell Brian had accepted that some things were just beyond his control. This was summed up perfectly when a couple of guys arrived to board the coach just as it was pulling away, and Brian spent the next five minutes chastising them over the tannoy. To be fair to Brian, he wasn’t visibly angry, you could tell by the tone of his voice he was very disappointed. The irony of his next lengthy tirade about how we shouldn’t take phone calls on the bus in case we disrupted fellow passengers was not lost on any of us.

Having a second shot at Auckland gave us the time to visit some sights that were further afield and that we didn’t manage to squeeze into our first visit. The first of these was the suburb of Devonport, located on a spit of land opposite downtown Auckland and easily reached via a short ferry. The suburb itself looks like a very comfortable place to live, with the perfect balance of quiet local life and proximity to the city centre. We enjoyed strolling the sunny streets and browsing the shops, before settling down at Corelli’s for brunch. Here, Sara enjoyed a generous helping of bacon and creamy mushrooms on wholegrain toast, which has swooped in and stolen the top spot on her list of NZ brunches.

Just behind Devonport is Mount Victoria, which is quite an impressive-sounding name for a 66m hill. Still, it occupies a great vantage point over Auckland’s harbour and has long been used as a defensive fort, first by the Māori and later by European settlers. Today, the hill functions as a public park, so we joined in with what most other Devonporters seemed to be doing, and climbed it in an attempt to work off our brunch. It was a little breezy at the top, in case you can’t tell!

Having been feeling a little under the weather since arriving in Auckland, I took our first day to recover while Sara went out for dinner alone. She returned with such rave reviews of the Ramen joint across from our hotel that I was keen to make it my recovery dinner, meaning Sara had to eat there two days running. I could tell it must have been really good as she didn’t seem at all upset at the prospect! As well as offering a traditional tonkotsu (pork bone broth) ramen, this place also specialises in sesame ramen, which we both tried. This turned out to be a deliciously rich and salty broth – the kind where the first mouthful makes your tastebuds dance, but by the last mouthful you’re totally defeated.

We also failed to visit Auckland Domain’s Winter Garden on our last visit, having previously arrived too late in the day. This time, things were different (by luck rather than skill!), and we enjoyed a lovely stroll around two beautiful glass houses and a fernery.

It felt very fitting to end our nearly two-month trip to New Zealand in the same city in which we arrived. Auckland really grew on us too, I think helped by better weather and staying in a more central location on our second visit. Having said that, Auckland still felt worlds away from the rest of the country, and couldn’t have been more of a contrast to the desert-like mountains of Central Otago or the wild west coast of the South Island. We were very sad to say goodbye, but as always, excited about the next leg.

We began our time in Rotorua with a casual stroll around the town and along the lakeside. At first glance, it’s just your average NZ town, until you start to notice the little pools of bubbling mud and steam rising from all over the place. And then, of course, there’s the pungent, eggy smell of sulphur that lingers in pockets, catching you out when you least expect it. That’s because Rotorua sits within the Taupō volcanic zone, which is an incredibly active geothermal area. Even the picturesque Lake Rotorua, on which the town sits and which looks very benign, is actually a volcanic caldera!

A walk through Government Gardens made for a pretty interesting combination of Māori heritage, European-style park landscaping and wild nature, but this was really just the beginning of the geothermal activity we would see.

Later in the day, we wandered through Kuirau Park, which had free foot spas that made use of the hot spring water, and more geothermal curiosities, including smoking piles of rock, bubbling pools of mud and a whole steaming lake. Again, though, this was just a warm up for what was to come tomorrow.

For the afternoon, we switched tack to see the other side of what Rotorua had to offer. Much like Queenstown on the South Island, Rotorua specialises in outdoor adrenaline activities, with a gondola to whisk visitors up Mount Ngongotaha to take part in things like mountain biking, ziplining and a 150 km/h sky swing. Seeing as we’d missed out on both the gondola and the luge track in Queenstown, we thought it was about time to put this right.

I made sure to get my money’s worth by going down the luge SO slowly that at one point Oli had to stop entirely to wait for me to catch up. Safety first!

To be honest, the biggest adrenaline rush probably came from our bus journey back into town, when we were picked up by an incredibly enthusiastic driver who wouldn’t accept our bus fare (we’re still not sure it was actually a public bus) and spent the entire journey frantically giving us emphatic recommendations for the local area while maintaining eye contact in the rear-view mirror and not looking at the road at all. The whole thing was both alarming and heartwarming, such was his level of enthusiasm. He even left his engine running in the middle of a busy road and hopped off the bus to point us in the direction of the Thursday night market, which was our next stop.

Here, we joined the longest queue we could find (always a good sign) and shared some of the locally-famous Johney’s dumplings as well as a satisfyingly spicy portion of channa masala and rice, all while enjoying some live music from the two-piece band.

The following day, we started bright and early with an attempt to visit the Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland 30 km south of town using only public transport and our own steam. We’d read online that this was just about possible, as long as we were prepared to do quite a bit of road walking and spend all day there to fit with bus times. A long day and the possibility of getting stranded in the middle of nowhere? Sign us up!

Our first hurdle was to get into the geothermal area containing the Lady Knox geyser, since we’d read online that pedestrians weren’t allowed to enter and we saw a huge sign saying the same. We thought that was a bit ridiculous and thankfully the person we spoke to at the visitor centre said it was fine, as long as we were VERY CAREFUL of the traffic while walking along the road. Well yes, we do know to avoid cars (of which there were very few) – we’d assumed it had more to do with the risk of falling into hidden ditches filled with boiling water!

Anyway, Lady Knox erupts every morning at 10.15am, which sounds impressive until you find out that one of the guides pours in organic soap powder and this sets it off. Exactly how this works is still a mystery, since their explanation was rather vague. But I have to say that seeing the occasional soapy bubble floating out of the erupting geyser did add a bit of comedy to the proceedings.

After this somewhat odd spectacle, we spent most of the rest of the day on the walking trails exploring the various geothermal features around Waiotapu. We saw a series of craters, some 15 m across and up to 20 m deep, formed after acidic steam rose from underground and eroded the ground until it caved in. At the bottom of one of the craters is a pool of boiling mud making a pretty ominous sound, which was recorded for use as Mordor sound effects in the Lord of the Rings films. In another crater, birds nest in holes in the walls, with the rising heat helping to incubate the eggs.

The whole area was hissing, bubbling and steaming, with hot waterfalls, unnatural-looking colours and strange deposits forming a landscape that looked unlike anywhere else we’ve ever been, and on a huge scale. It was quite an assault on the senses, but the indiginous population knew how to make the most of this environment, and used the heat for cooking and collected unrefined crude oil from the mud pools to burn in lanterns. We just did our best to stay on the paths and not get ourselves in hot water, which was tricky as I was trying to navigate using yesterday’s map of the luge tracks and couldn’t work out why nothing seemed to fit!

The star attraction is the Champagne Pool, the largest hot spring in NZ with a maximum depth of 62 m, which takes its name from the fizzing of carbon dioxide in the alkaline water. While it looked very appealing on a chilly day, the spring that feeds the pool is 230°C and the water contains such minerals as arsenic, thallium and mercury, so probably not brilliant for a dip…

Even more alarming was the lime-green colour of the Roto Karikitea, or Devil’s Bath, which had a pH of 2 – roughly the same as lemon juice. I know it looks like I’ve filtered this picture, but it really was this bright! Fun fact: the canteen in our University Hall used to serve a cake that was just this shade of green. Funnily enough, we all called it radioactive cake.

Our final stop before catching our return bus were the Waiotapu mud pools, which sat outside the Thermal Wonderland park and were free to visit. These were so mesmerising that we could barely tear ourselves away – it’s difficult to explain why, but they made such satisfying blip blopping sounds and we got really into predicting which mini mud-volcano would erupt next. I know it’s probably hard to believe from the gif below, but it was the best thing we saw all day!

Finally, after a busy and baffling day of geothermal wonderment, we hopped onto the bus to take us back into Rotorua. Then, early the next morning, we set off back to Auckland to complete our figure-eight of NZ and return to where it all began, nearly two months ago.

We arrived in sunny Napier by coach from Wellington, and started to make our way towards our apartment on foot.

It’s always a bad sign when the map resembles one of those curly mazes on the back of a cereal box, with none of the roads leading in the direction we wanted to go. The shortest route took us through Tiffen Park, which sounded lovely until we realised this was more like scaling a cliff face than a walk in the park. Then our route took us downhill again. And then up again. And a couple more ups and downs as we got lost explored the Bluff Hill neighbourhood thoroughly. We were exhausted by the time we arrived at our apartment!

Napier is pretty unique in its consistent Art Deco style, having been almost entirely rebuilt following a devastating earthquake and resulting fire that hit the city in 1931. Instead of relocating, Napier’s residents chose to stay, and instead of recreating the past, they took the opportunity to embrace modernity. The city was rebuilt in just a few short years, and was briefly known as the world’s most modern city as a result. Walking around Napier felt like we’d time-travelled back to the 1930s, only with modern businesses inhabiting the tastefully restored buildings. After a slightly disappointing trip to Ranfurly (another town known for its Art Deco architecture) while cycling the Otago Central Rail Trail, we didn’t have particularly high hopes for Napier, but this time there were beautiful examples everywhere we turned. Our walking tour alone had over 70 stops on it, and this was just scratching the surface!

The vast majority of shopfronts were decorated in bright colours with graphical motifs, bold columns and often carried the name of the original business owner just below the roof. We diligently followed our self-guided walking tour around the city, and learned that many of the buildings had taken inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright, a highly successful American architect, which explained why the city seemed to have a slightly American twist.

That afternoon, we hired a tandem with a plan to cycle around the peninsula to the suburb of Ahuriri to round off our architecture tour at its star building – the National Tobacco Company Building. Billed as “the region’s Art Deco masterpiece”, we were slightly underwhelmed at its rather rundown appearance. To be honest, our reaction might have been partly due to the fallout from our recent traversal of Ahuriri’s one way system – I’d made a surprise emergency stop and unintentionally tipped Sara off the tandem and into a gutter while giving way, which irked her slightly for some reason. We later returned to Napier’s seafront via a second trip to the gutter on the opposite side of the one way system, before ducking into an Irish pub to repair our relationship.

That evening, we headed out to Vinci’s Pizza for dinner. The pizzeria is housed in a building with a beautiful wooden and glass frontage, very similar to the music shop next door (pictured below). Here we ordered a giant (18 inch) sourdough pizza, because we’d agreed that it’s better to over-order and have leftovers than under-order and be hungry. Still, you can probably see where this is going, and obviously we rose to the challenge and finished the whole thing. So full were we that we nearly didn’t make it back up Bluff Hill to our apartment.

The following morning, we woke to stunning sunshine and the sound of birds singing in the trees outside. One of the neighbourhood cats promptly arrived at our door, pleading to be let in so she could join us for breakfast. We totally would have let her in if we hadn’t had specific instructions NOT TO ALLOW THE CAT IN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Where’s the fun in that?!

With some time to kill before our onward bus to the geothermal hotspot of Rotorua, we spent the morning enjoying the sunshine in the elegantly named Clive Square. This was a charming place to spend time, especially with musical backing from the park’s Carillon (musical bells), which played four tunes twice an hour. Apparently the melodies change regularly, and feature a mix of nursery rhymes, seasonal tunes and popular songs.

At midday we boarded our bus towards Rotorua. As we exited Napier, we saw first hand the damage and destruction left by floods that hit the region in February 2023 after Cyclone Gabrielle. Whole vineyards had been destroyed, buildings had been gutted, railway banks had been washed away, leaving rails and sleepers suspended in mid-air, hundreds of trees had been relocated, and huge piles of silt had been deposited downstream. While the state of emergency has ended, it was clear that the repair effort was still very much underway. It was shocking to see the level of damage, but if the 1931 earthquake response is anything to go by, the region will come back even stronger than before and we’re wishing them well.