New Zealand’s own YELLOWSTONE
Locals and visitors take advantage of mineral-rich springs of ‘Rotten-Rua’
I’d been warned about the stink. It hit me the instant I stepped off the plane in Rotorua: a mix of bad egg and warm sewer gas that has earned this city on New Zealand’s North Island the nickname “Sulphur City” — or, less kindly, “Rotten-Rua.” I sucked in a deep breath and smiled. That subterranean scent meant I would soon be soaking in curative hot springs, smothering my body in primeval goo and exploring a land of burping mud pots, prismatic pools, boiling rivers and shooting geysers.
The Rotorua region, one of the world’s most geothermally active areas, is the Southern Hemisphere’s take on Yellowstone — minus bison, bears and backedup crowds. Gases and steam hiss out of everywhere: In pastures, in backyards, in the middle of the city’s huffing lakeside park, where visitors find free thermal foot baths and cautionary danger signs. Modern-day eruptions there have thrown football-size chunks of mud and rock many storeys high.
That volatility is, to borrow a Kiwi phrase, “a bit of a worry.” But locals who live on this thin crust of quake-prone, jerked-about earth with molten rock stirring beneath them remain unflappable. They’re used to a landscape constantly being made and remade by eruptive geological forces. “It’s a new country,” one genial fellow reassured me with a shrug. “Things are going to happen.”
Boosters began pitching the healing properties of Rotorua’s hot, mineralrich springs and geothermal attractions in the 1880s, when they created the town as a tourist destination. In recent years, their descendants have upped the ante, casting the region as the adventure capital of the North Island: “New Zealand’s coolest hot spot.”
They’ve done their job well. Last year, an estimated 3.8 million visitors flocked here, Kiwis slightly outnumbering international visitors. When they’re not detoxifying in mineral water at a local spa, tramping through acres of geothermal oddities or learning about native Maori traditions at a cultural centre, tourists shell out dollars to raft Class 5 rapids, bungee jump, parasail, “zorb” down hills in large plastic balls, go on four-wheeldrive bush safaris, ride zip lines, negotiate courses of high ropes and zip downhill on a little land luge.
Before any thrills, I needed to chill. As soon as we set down our bags, my jet-lagged friends and I beelined to the popular Polynesian Spa in downtown Rotorua. We arrived early and avoided the afternoon busloads of chattering tourists with their telescoping selfie sticks. I put on my jandals (Kiwi for flip-flops), took off my jewelry (silver turns black in sulphuric water), stripped to my bathing suit and started hopping from pool to pool — our “adult” package (about $27) included numerous mineral pools and no kids. As I steeped in waters more than 100 F said to ease arthritic pain and promote ageless beauty, I slowly unwound, taking in the sweeping views of Lake Rotorua and the vapours trailing across it. This huge, water-filled volcanic caldera has, in recent years, spontaneously erupted in 18-metre geysers.
It’s a new country, I thought. Things happen.
Rejuvenated and rested, I sat down to make a list of gotta-gos, sorting through the brochures I’d picked up at the helpful i-SITE information centre downtown.