travels with janne

Our next little adventure was a day spent in Tongariro National Park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There is an abudance of volcanic activity in this area, the latest major eruption being in 1995 right in the middle of skiing season. Fortunately, the volcano erupted in the middle of the night so no one was on the slopes, but eruptions that destroy buildings, ski lifts and railways do occur with alarming frequency.

Mount Ngauruhoe is a beautiful, cone-shaped mountain with snow glazing its slopes like ice cream running down an ice cream cone. The mountain looks just like a volcano is supposed to look. Its next-door neighbour, Mount Ruapehu, is completely snow-covered and is a popular ski area.

We are incredibly lucky with the weather: it is sunny and warm and the skies are very clear – so clear, in fact, that we were able to see the 2518 metres high Mount Taranaki about 150 kilometres away. The clear skies and the holey ozone layer are also two reasons that I am pretty pink in the face and have started to smother myself in high-factor sun block.

The combination of snow on the mountains and fiery lava within them is fascinating. I would love to see a volcano in action, but what we saw today was pretty good, too. We did several walks of various lengths and with quite variable nature. Altogether we hiked about 12 kilometres up and down mountain slopes, through lush green forests, and past busy brooks, rushing streams and plunging waterfalls. We have had great views of the snow-covered volcanic mountains and seen lots of nifty plants, lichen and mosses.

There is just a thin layer of crusty earth between me and the workings of the earth. A huge area of North Island is a wide belt of geothermal activity with boiling and bubbling mud and water and lots of stinky steam escaping here, there and everywhere. Today, we visited Wai-O-Tapu, a huge geothermal area south of Rotorura and north of Turangi.

Such an amazing and weird landscape!. It bubbles, it boils, it smells, it steams. Geysers gush and mud roils like a huge cup of hot chocolate in which the milk has gone off. Bacteria and mineral deposits create amazing colour displays of rusty red, emerald green, murky green, sulphur yellow, and turquoise. The mud, stones and water contain gold, arsenic, mercury, antimony, iron and sulphur, so it is a veritable hot pot of alchemy, poison and valuable minerals.

We also watched a geyser go off at its appointed time thanks to the park ranger pouring soap into the chimney to alter the surface tension of the water.

After the geothermal area we drove past Lake Taupo, New Zealand’s largest lake, which gave great views of Mt. Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe. In the foreground were flowering yellow lupines and gorse.

Speaking of snow and flowers, it seems so incongruous to be seeing lupines, gorse, cherry trees, roses and rhododendrons in full bloom at the same time as advertisements for Christmas bargains and shop windows displaying snowy landscapes with Santa Claus and sleigh bells.

It’s like a direct connection to Hell. Boiling, bubbling, and foul-smelling, the hot, sulphurous waters just under the surface in and around Rotorura create mysterious, steamy areas that look apocalyptic. Smelly steam rises from the Government Gardens in the centre of Rotorura town, where a park full of hot pools is situated; it rises from the chimneys of thermally heated motels; it rises from the sewers, and it rises from holes in the ground that appear here and there like rabbit warren saunas.

The bubbling hot sulphurous water pools sound like casseroles of water just before they are ready to boil over. Pools of luscious fine mud blop and plop like a coffee percolator that is just starting up. The sounds and the smells are not all. The water, earth and surrounding plants are coloured from a palette of sulphurous yellow, rusty red, murky grey, opaque turquoise, ashen white, and mossy green.

This is also the land of the Maori, New Zealand’s proud, original people. Like other Polynesians, they have their origins in Southeast Asia. Both men and women are often beautifully tattooed with individual, symbolic designs. When greeting each other in the traditional way, they gently press noses and exchange the breath of life. Not quite as gentle is the way they greet enemies. In this case they bulge their eyes and stick out their tongues as far as they can go, shout terrifically and show muscle almost like gorillas hammering their chests. It is quite daunting!

We were given an impression of this, as well as a beautiful love song and various games and dances in a local Maori village that has opened its doors to tourists. The village, called Whakarewarewa, is situated right in the midst of a huge area with steamy, sulphurous pools. This gives the village a rather mystic atmosphere.

The villagers use the hot water to dip food into for cooking, to bathe in and to wash clothes in. Living right on top of so much geothermal activity does pose practical problems, though. When people die, it is not possible to bury them six feet under. In fact, just digging down a couple of feet will reveal bubbling hot water. Instead, the dead are placed in stone coffins above ground, with the result that space for the dead in the village is at a premium.

Huge ferns and fern trees, kauri trees, palm trees and trees to me unknown that look like they have an ancient genetic history fill this primordial forest. It is reminiscent of illustrations showing what the world looked like when the continents were joined in Gondwana, when dinosaurs wandered the earth, before the Ice Age did it off with them, and before we humans came and mucked everything up.

Verdant, lush, mysterious. Epiphytes attach themselves to the trees like botanical penthouse apartments, providing living space for tiny insects and other organisms. Everyone strives for the top, reaching for the light. It is like walking through a rain forest but without the mugginess, the snakes, the leeches, and the creepy crawlies. This is the Coromandel Peninsula on the east side of New Zealand’s North Island.

We walk through an area containing New Zealand’s few remaining kauri trees, called Kauri Grove. The kauri are ancient, slow-growing trees. The wood is very durable making it a sought after product for timber. That was almost it’s demise but just before loggers rendered it extinct, environmentalists stepped in and now the precious kauri tree is conserved. They grow tall (up to 50 m), wide (3 m in diameter) and old (several thousand years). A great tree for a nice big hug.

At every twist and turn (and there are a lot of those!) the hilly and sometimes mountainous landscape is lush and green. When not covered with forest, the land is covered by a velvety green carpet of grass, and huge herds of dairy cows and sheep and beefy cattle graze the slopes (and burp and fart lots of greenhouse gases). The plants in people’s gardens merge with the wild plants and it is sometimes hard to see where the man-made stops and nature takes over. It must be a dream to be a gardener here.

Occasionally all of this incredible greenness is broken by clear-cut areas, where the forest has been shaved away, leaving just the bare slopes and something that looks like an ecological disaster area. It looks like forests are replanted here and there but just with a monotony of pine trees. Such a shame.

We are now on the other side of the world. We have crossed the equator. We have flown about 20.000 kilometres, which is approximately half of the earth’s circumference. We have crossed umpteen time zones and we are now 12 hours ahead of home. If we had flown just a little bit more we would have crossed the international date line and ended up in yesterday again. I have given up trying to eat and sleep regularly and just try to go with the flow. The result is that I am sleepy and hungry at all the wrong times. Tomorrow is today and today becomes yesterday.

At any rate, we have finally arrived in New Zealand, a full three days after leaving home. Auckland is an okay city, I guess, although right now I’m mostly itching to get away from it all and see some kiwi landscape. The city has a youthful feel, especially the kind of youth who go bungy jumping all over the place or do other crazy outdoorsy thing. Just outside out hotel window (we are on the 13th floor) there is a kind of ride that simulates a bungy jump, so we hear screams at regular intervals. Further on down the road is the Sky Tower, from which people pay to bungy jump, right in the middle of the busy city. Weird tastes!

Although I have visited 38 countries in five continents, I am pleased that I can still get excited about embarking on new adventures, such as this trip to the other side of the world in New Zealand. First stop on the very long way is Singapore, which means I can chalk up yet another country on my growing list.

Singapore is a charming mix of old and new, oriental and western, city and rain forest. A wide array of palm trees, some of them sporting coconuts, some of them adorned with epiphytes, and mimosas, fig trees, and flowering trees and bushes that I don’t even recognize lend a rain forest feel to the bustling city. Birds and butterflies abound in the greenery. There is so much verdant lushness that you sometimes forget that you are in one of the largest port cities and commercial centres of the Far East.

The skyline is characterized by modern skyscrapers and a veritable forest of building cranes. I have never seen so many cranes in one place, not even in Shanghai. The number of ships in the harbour is pretty amazing, too. It looks like an aquatic multi-lane highway. I’m impressed that they don’t bash into each other.

Singapore has several distinct neighbourhoods including a Chinatown and an Indian neighbourhood. There are a lots of Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims. Temples, mosques, pagodas, prayers, pudgy and happy Buddhas, and incense permeate the atmosphere in a charming mêlée of multiethnicity.