Today we drove to Rotorua. It’s a little over three hours north of Napier. We took highway 5, the thermal explorer highway. We drove on portions of that same highway on our way to Napier but didn’t really get the name. Turns out highway 5 goes along a number of sulfures thermals. We learned this by stopping at one of them, Wai-O-Tapu. It’s a super well organized park built around beautiful streams and hot springs (look at the pictures if you don’t believe me). The price of entry is not so much money but the smell. Holly crap does sulfure smells! I still can taste it.
We haven’t had the time to appreciate much of Rotorua but we did take some time to stop and appreciate its main feature: the lake. As we have a bunch of them in Quebec it’s not very impressive. What was impressive however was the numbers of ducks and, specially, black swans. Then we figured out that one of the things tourists do, despite the signs, is feed the birds. This explains the number of birds in such a small area. Still meeting the birds really made Karine happy.
