Rotorua

[squirmelia]

We stopped to look at a waterfall; looked for fluorescent blue fungi out of the camper van window; plunged into hot tubs in Rotorua that night, surrounded by plants.

The steam rising from every street corner in Rotorua, rising from gardens, rising from parks, worried me at first, after having been in Melbourne when the Black Saturday bushfires were raging across Victoria. I kept thinking that something was on fire. Of course, it wasn't, it was just the geothermal activity that causes the steam to rise. The smell of sulphur was strong.

It felt magical to walk through a park with many different bubbling pools and steam everywhere, so that the trees would disappear in the steam sometimes, and then reappear. I felt like it was a whole different world we had found, there in Rotorua. In the park, I saw basket fungi, but did not at first believe it was fungi, because of the pentagons.

I went to Wai-o-tapu Thermal Wonderland and saw pools of many different colours - red, green, yellow, multi-coloured craters, and the champagne pool; sipped blueberry wines and gooseberry liqueurs at the Mamaku Blue Blueberry Experience; saw lots of squelchy bubbling mud, with bubbles that would burst and spit mud into the air.