A real tasty geyser

So the car is packed for our girls roadie and I could be off on tour with Ivana and Ivanka Trump there's so much luggage in the boot. My friend Amanda, her daughter Anouk and I are going to Rotorua, home to New Zealand's finest hot springs and spouting geysers. It's quite a drive across the central plains of the North Island so we stop off at the newly nicknamed town of Hobbiton for lunch. It's where much of The Hobbit was filmed and has a hobbit's house for its tourist information centre.

I smell Rotorua before I see it. When we get out of the car to look at the lake the all-pervading sulphurous aroma hits home. Amanda and Anouk chill out at our little apartment but I'm itching to be moving so I drive up to the nearby Redwood forest to walk a few of the trails there.

In the morning we drive to Waiotapu, a hot springs park about 30 miles south of Rotorua. There's a geyser show scheduled for 10.15am and we manage to bag front row seats. Of course, the 'eruption' is artificially controlled by a man called Garth, who empties a packet of soap suds or some such catalyst down the geyser's gullet and stands well back. It's not the highest geyser ever – the water table being quite low – but from our vantage point it's a fine show.

Then we spend an hour or so walking trails around the geothermal park we've paid $30 to enter. There is every type of geothermal wonder here and it is surrounded by forested hills, a more natural setting than some of the big parks in town that have earned the town the nickname Rotovegas. Here are silica terraces, not that big yet but give them a thousand years.
The champagne pool bubbles away contentedly, fringed with orange and swirling with steam.



The vibrant yellow of this sulphur pond is like something out of a paint pot, and everywhere there is steam, steam and more steam. We learn about the birds who build nests in nooks in the walls of the springs. The hot air literally babysits the eggs while the birds go out on the town.



For lunch Amanda has booked a cruise on Lake Rotorua but I decide I'd rather be walking so I set off around its shore. Beautiful black swans paddle towards me hoping for nibbles.

I pass a building sheltering an enormous Maori canoe with this fearsome figurehead and a little further on I see top tribal graffiti decorating the lakeside park's public loos.


I reach Sulphur Bay, an inlet of the lake, where the hot springs emerge and spill out into a huge pale blue lagoon. Hidden in the bushes nearby there are bubbling cauldrons of brown sludge – one is called the Coffee Pot – in which men used to dunk themselves for the cure. They had to tie themselves to the surrounding Manuka bushes so they didn't go under.
We all meet up again to drive to some pools you can have a soak and a swim in, at Waikite. Anouk is ready first.

Waikite pools overlook rolling farmland and feel like the sort of place the locals go. There's a short eco trek, which leads through the gully and up to the spring discharging all the hot water for the pools. It's a primeval scene, like how you'd imagine the dawn of time. Anouk is into alliteration and calls it steamy, swampy and spluttering.

The pools vary in temperature from 36 to 40 degrees and we decide that 38 degrees is just about perfect. Great care has been taken to create as natural setting as possible, particularly around the outer pools.We're joined by quite a few Maori families who have come for a soak in the sunset.

On the way home the pink setting sun shines onto this lone cloud and turns it into an alien spaceship. It follows us all the way home.
That night we eat at Rotorua's top family restaurant, Fat Dogs, much to Anouk's delight. Amanda meets an old school friend from Pukekohe who is now a grandmother. 

The next day we pop over to the Saturday morning market. It is held in the town park, which also features the town's free geothermal attractions. Right behind this food stall, for example, is a bubbling, scalding-hot pool.

Before we leave there is one last attraction we have to visit – the mud pools. We're transfixed by the sights and sounds of the mud spouts plip-plopping in conversation with each other. Every so often there's a spurt, like a great fountain of gunge. 

This kind of geothermal activity makes me feel vaguely uneasy, the boiling and bubbling reminding me just what the earth's crust is covering up, quite thinly in places like this. Now we're off somewhere even more unpredictable, the Tongariro National Park, where one volcano erupted as recently as 2007. Gulp.