Mum arrives and we do Taupo

Taupo lakeside panorama

So Mum arrived just over a week ago and says the flight 'wasn't too bad', make of that what you will.  I was working the first weekend after she arrived (world cup final weekend - very quiet, there wasn't a Kiwi in the country who was going to miss that match by getting admitted to hospital!), so she, Hannah and the kids chilled out and pottered around our local beaches.  This weekend just gone I was speaking at a conference at Lake Taupo...
... so we headed down on Thursday and had three days by the lake.  Disappointingly, the offer on our hotel's website of indulging ourselves at the 'Beach Brassiere' turned out to be a typo and the dining options were entirely traditional.  Weather was a bit overcast most of the time, but the great thing about geothermal springs is that the water is always lovely and warm!  Walking along the lake front, we discovered several springs that feed into the lake, one with a 'danger hot water' sign next to it.  Even the pool in the hotel was geothermally heated and about bath temperature.  Once I'd got my talks out the way we had a great 'tramp' (localism) down the Waikato river (NZ's longest) from Taupo to Huka Falls, stopping to swim in some pools where a little hot water spring met the river.

At first it was actually too hot to get in, but you could find a happy medium between the river and spring water like mixing the taps in the bath.  Tilly loved it straight off, but Reuben was a bit put off by scalding hot water in a stream.  Once we'd worked out where to find the cooler bits though he loved it too.

The walk up to the falls was about 3km and Tilly surpassed herself, doing at least half of it at Reuben pace before accepting a ride in the back pack.  Little legs a blur of motion.  The falls were more rapids than a cascade, but as there was over 200,000L of water a second going through a 5m wide channel they were no less impressive.  We were all struck by how much bluer the rivers are down here and finally understood the comment of an old Kiwi friend while we were at university who couldn't understand why the Thames was brown!  The water coming over the falls was an amazing ice blue, something to do with the bubbles trapped in it according to the sign, and it was really beautiful.

The next day we headed off to the Craters of the Moon, a geothermal area where steam hisses out through cracks in the ground and fumaroles.  The odd sulfurous whiff too (not Tilly - we checked).  Reuben decided that the steam was being made by hidden dragons but it was ok because they only ate knights and we weren't wearing any armour, so the dragons wouldn't be interested in us.  We wandered round through atmospheric clouds of steam and kept thinking that it really wasn't like Britain!

We're back in Auckland now and hoping to head out to Waiheke Island on Wednesday.  After that we've got a trip planned to Rotorua for 5 days and at the end of November we'll be heading to the Coromandel Penisula for another 5 days.  More photos of our Taupo trip available here.