Rotauro - gets you in the back of the throat

Aptly known as Sulfur City it sits on top of the most violent segment of the Taupo Volcanic Zone. The home of geothermal unrest. Limestone caverns, volcanic wastelands, steaming geysers and bubbling, hissing

ponds. Personally we would hate to live somewhere that constantly smelt of rotting eggs! The joy of hydrogen sulfide. Even the local golf course has it's own thermal hot spots where a lost ball stays lost forever.

Our campsite for the night in Waitanke had it's own thermal pools, around 6 in total. So once checked in we slipped into swimmers and waded into the steaming pools. Every pool is drained, cleaned and refilled each night with fresh geothermal water (so no floating corn plasters here). Most pools were between 35-40 degrees, toasty! We came out suitably wrinkly. If you walk around the back of the campsite you find the source of the hot water, a large bubbling cauldron which then forms a hot steamy stream to the baths. The water at source is around 98 degrees. It then gets cooled by running down a series of platforms within the valley to a more comfortable bathing temperature.

The campsite, keen to use this natural heat resource to the max, had a drying room for wet kit etc. Here they have plumbed in an old radiator to the hot spring water and voila a warm dry airing cupboard for your wet towels, genius.

Surprisingly we spent 3 hours in the Rotarua museum! This building used to be the old Bath House. Back in the late 1800 the local natural resources were tamed in the name of health, and not much safety, to

please the very early European tourists. A real insight to New Zealand's first major investment into tourism, the 'Great South Seas Spa' movement.

Various treatments were on offer, some sounding more appealing than others: Circular needle douche,

High frequency electric treatment, Hot air bath and some Orthopaedic apparatus to help the old joints.

The Bath House is a Elizabethan styled building and was constructed where two totally different types of waters met, waters of high acidic and alkaline content.

The Baths were developed as part of Rotarua's regeneration following the eruption of Tarawera, the most destructive volcanic disaster in NZ recorded history, back in 1886 which caused mass devastation and

resulted in the loss of 120 lives, blame it on tectonics.

All this sitting in a volcano cone some 220,000 years old. From the roof top you could see the shadow of the former lake levels on the mountain. Over time it's evaporated to then create Rotarua.

At the time of the eruption the area was already receiving many European visitors who flocked to bathe in the waters in a hope to cure diseases and illnesses from gout to arthritis. The actual baths themselves weren't made out of any old porcelain oh no. Royal Doulton porcelain was used no less but many were removed in the 1960s when the building was temporarily owned and used by the local council as a storage site. It's unsure what ever happened to many of the fixtures that were removed around this time, but surely the local reclamation yard was laughing!

That night we experienced a hangi, a traditional Maori feast. We had a full Maori welcome with the hongi, pressing together of noses which is an age old Maori gesture that shows friendship. The food is slow

cooked in the ground and tasted great.