Glow Worms and Geysers

After Tahiti, we flew into Auckland, on the north island of New Zealand. I have to confess, ignorant though I am and nice though it has been, I was glad to be back in the Anglosphere.  Even if they do murder their vowels somewhat.

A confused but capable karuma

We didn't stay in Auckland (we're back there for a few days just before we leave), but we had to hang around long enough to pick up our car at the airport.  The motor itself is an inoffensive, if confusing, Mitsubishi Galant which is plainly a Japanese import that was meant for the Japanese market, if the Kanji script all over the electronic displays is any measure.  The car seems to be as in the dark as I, however, as the swish on-board GPS constantly reports us as swimming in the Sea of Japan, stoically paddling toward Nagato.

It was rather sanguine about the whole thing, considering

Rental cars in NZ are notoriously high-mileage compared to other countries.  Whereas cars in the UK or US are normally sold on after 30,000 miles or so, here they aren't considered 'old' until about 130,000 km. Ours came with a rather modest 114,000 km on the clock,  which is just old enough to have that yellow engine warning light come on, signifying that you are in dire need of paying someone with a computer £250 to reset it. The rental companies here even keep a discount fleet of older vehicles if you're brave, budget-conscious and don't mind fitting a new clutch on the way back to the airport.

Our first stop was Hamilton, a quiet and pleasant enough place that we largely ignored until after we'd found a cinema showing the new Star Wars film.  Otherwise the Internet would've been a minefield of pricks hiding in every comment section.  Thus immune to spoilers, we emerged and found an Indian restaurant - which are apparently as popular here as they are in the UK.  Still didn't have poppadoms though.  I'm getting the DTs.

Maintaining our breakneck pace, we went to the Hamilton botanical gardens the following day, which is set up in 'themes' - with gardens styled in various local and international fashions.  The chap below is from the Maori garden, which was markedly different from the 'English' garden in several overtly anatomical ways.

I say.

Then we drove to Waitomo, where there are natural caves formed around a subterranean stream, which are breeding areas for the Arachnocampa luminosa or New Zealand glow worm.  I borrowed the stock image below, as they don't allow cameras to stop us firing the flash by accident or walking into rock by accident (and nothing at all to do with selling you pictures in the gift shop).  Anyway, it was very pretty.  They are the maggot from a type of gnat, by the way -that's PR for you.

We then stayed in Rotorua, which lives on the Rotorua caldera, which means that of the five major places on the planet you can find geysers, we've now visited three on this trip. Russia and Iceland will have to wait.  Rotorua boasts myriad hot springs and geyser locations, one of which being the 'living' Maori thermal village of Whakarewarewa.

That's easy for you to say

The people that live here,  the Tuhourangi/Ngati Wahiao, live in and around the hot springs, geysers and geothermal mud pools, utilising the water to heat their homes, cook food and bathe themselves.
Before we had a look around, there were performances of Maori songs and dances as well as the obligatory haka.

The local kids have a rite of passage where they dive for pennies thrown from the bridge into the water on the way into the village.  There is apparently a hierarchy among the coin-divers whereby the oldest look after the youngest such that no child has ever come to harm in the river in the village's history.

There are channels cut by the villagers that funnel the hot water into various useful locations. Natural steam vents have boxes built over them and are covered and used for cooking food.  Some pools are used for cooking more directly - you can buy corn-on-the-cob which is placed in a muslin cloth and lowered into the water for two minutes to perfection.  All this steaming and boiling along with the villager's aversion to seasoning does make all their food rather boring, though.

Living here does have some rather unavoidable hazards - it's not unknown for people to come home and find a new geyser of vent in their living room, like in this example here:

"fucksocks"

Way back when, the Europeans turned this lot Christian as well. But there were competing missions from the Catholics and Anglicans, who each built a church in the village.  The Chief at the time simply assigned one half of the village to one and the other half to the other. When asked the difference between the two by this villagers, he shrugged and said: "This lot are Italian; that lot are English." - which was found to be a satisfactory explanation.

  There are other signs of English influence, like the bowler hat on this totem:

Seamless

The village managed to acquire a 1.5km exclusion zone around their location, preventing hotels in Rotorua town from sinking bore holes to create hot spring facilities.  Evidently, when the town took off as a tourist trap, everyone did exactly that and that changed the dynamic of the geothermal features of this village.   So now their supply has a bit more legal protection and the closest hotels had their bore holes filled in.  The remaining hotels with hot springs probably didn't mind, either.

While we were in Rotorua we bought our provisions for Christmas and acquired a couple of new phones - having tested Chan's to destruction in Tahiti and after mine decided to follow its lead by way of solidarity.  Fortunately one can get half-decent tech with not much these days.

Bollocks to the foam-art; get it in my face hole.

Most of our accommodation in NZ is some manner of motel with its own catering facilities, so I made sure to buy some English-style sausages, as I had a real medical need for a sausage butty for breakfast.  It's so odd that the closest place to the the UK food and culture-wise is literally as far away as humanly possible.  The local love of coffee (The flat white came from NZ, by the way) has done them no harm in my estimation, especially after the crushing disappointment of South America in that regard.

   
Rotorua is within a large network of lakes, owing to its volcanic nature.  Rotorua and Tarawera are the largest but the more visually interesting are the smaller lakes Rotokakahi and Tikitapu (or the Green and Blue lakes, respectively).  They are adjacent but have widely contrasting hues, owing to their mineral content.

We had a nose round the local redwood forest, as we were on the way past.  Those are some big trees.

We relocated to Taupo, which also lives on a caldera with its own bit of volcanic action.  Here the heat is used more industriously as it is the home of a geothermal power station.  Lake Taupo -another monster of a lake whose scale is baffling to a Brit- is the result of a dormant volcano magma chamber collapsing.

We made sure to visit one of the hot spring locations on Christmas Eve.  The springs arrangement is four pools feeding into one another, with the hottest at the top.  The water feeding the pools is ridiculously hot and it's only the users' good sense that stops them from getting too close to the feeds and getting maimed.  My expectations and experience of the aggregate intellect of the consuming public would expect weekly fatalities, but apparently this isn't the case. One couple was complaining that it didn't allow children in and then went off in a huff.  I'm sure they had spare kids.

Last visit in the area was to the flamboyantly-named "Craters of the Moon", which has none of the drama of Yellowstone or Tatio but is an diverting enough walkabout.  I'm a bit spoiled when it comes to geothermal spectacle though.

We did our final bit of food shopping for Christmas on the way out. In the international section they had Sherbert DibDabs, but Chan's Marmite was in the domestic bit, which betrays just how corrupted by us they are here.  I also found a Christmas pudding, so the year is saved.

Next stop: Christmas in Napier.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Wir sind in Neuseeland gekommen.  Ich bin glucklich dass, jetzt wir in ein Englischsprachigesland sind.  Hier kann ich echte Kaffee und Wurstchen finden.  Wir haben noch mehr Geysire gesehen, aber in diesen Tagen bin ich schwerer zu beeindrucken.

Into the Atacama

The driest place on the planet (that isn't at a pole) is the Atacama desert.  Naturally one must pop in when one is in the same continent, if only to say "Huh, this is a very picturesque blighted hellscape, don't you agree darling?".

We flew to Calama, the closest thing to civilisation, before making our way to San Pedro de Atacama.  San Pedro exists in the middle of several points of natural beauty and therefore serves as hub for adventurous tourists and some truly certifiable cyclists.   The town looks poor, but as far as I know it might just be scruffy because everyone apparently insists on building their own place - sometimes in a heroic triumph of optimism and economy over competence and utility.   The preponderance of unbaked adobe brick (if nothing else, this trip has left me well versed in brick) would mean that half the town would dissolve in a day of British drizzle.

Forsaking the numerous tours offered in the area, we hired a vehicle to see it all for ourselves.  This time we got something more appropriate in that we had a diesel-chugging behemoth 4x4 pickup truck. Behold El Monstruo:

 

Leading to several yells of "It's gripped; It's sorted; Let's offroad!" before totally fucking up the diff lock and stalling.

Suitably saddled up, we set about it.  I did forget my passport and immigration receipt on the second day, which made for some awkward conversation at a police checkpoint near the Bolivian and Argentine borders.  They wrestled with whether to press the issue after it became clear that I was clearly an imbecile who couldn't speak Spanish.  Ultimately they erred on the side of laziness and waved me on with a scornful look.

The desert is dotted with volcanoes, salt flats and the occasional lagoons, and is home to a fair abundence of wildlife. They have guanacos here -as in Patagonia- but also llamas and vicuñas (a smaller variant with different colours- the national animal of Peru, no less): They also have the occasional donkey.

Flamingos also feature - especially at the Chaxas Lagoon, which is home to three varieties.  They live off the brine shrimp found lurking in the salty water. Brine shrimp are a bit weird, by the way: they lay eggs that can lay dormant for decades, being hatched when required.  There were also a few lizards and other birds knocking about, eating what the Flamingos kick up when they're looking for food.

There was also a rather inprobable valley filled with vegetation, which was originally irrigated by the local natives and was improved upon subsequently.  It was very modestly reminiscent of Zion national park in that it was a very green oasis full of life in the middle of desolation. The caves cut into the cliffs and the remaining petroglyphs are also a bit similar to the Pueblo villages we saw in New Mexico.

The first night, we were taken into the hills by the local astromical institute to do some stargazing. The absolute absence of metropolitan glare and the sheer space available make this area particularly suited for staring into the inky nothingness above.  Our Canadian guide -equipped with a very nifty green laser- pointed out the constellations, even thought they were all wrong and upside-down due to our being in an unnatural hemisphere. The aussies in attendance were somewhat baffled by the absence of the southern cross.  It is all a matter of latitude, my dear loaf-stealers. There were ten telescope of various types, pre-trained on astronomical bodies which we could walk around and observe.  Then there was a Q&A session in the lodge with cocoa.

I took a stab at some long exposure photos while I was there.  We have a bridge camera rather than an SLR, and the stabilisation circuit is playing up (I bought some screwdrivers in Santiago - it will rue the day) but here you go:

The first obigatory thing to do in this area is to visit Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) at sunset.  A stout fellow from Mexico named Diego helped us out at the admin point on the way in, in that he had change for the ticket and could translate for us.  The day was running out so we threw his bike in the back and he came along with us to see what there was to see.  This first picture below is called Las Tres Marías (The Three Marias), because that is literally what they call anything they find that has three things in Latin America. This area is where NASA tests it's rover vehicles, as it emulates forbidding alien rocky terrain rather well.

The second obligatory thing to do is catch the geysers at El Tatio at sunrise.  Unlike Yellowstone, where you can watch them gassing off all day, it's so hot here you need to come first thing where it's so cold one can witness brass monkeys frantically searching for a welder.  The rest of the day, they're just bubbling holes in the ground.  So we got up at Jesus fucking Christ o'clock in order to drive the 90km up there in time for sunrise at 06:00.  It was quite pretty, even if my extremities turned black and fell off.  They don't bother with the Yellowstone-style secure boardwalks over tested solid ground here, so occasionally hapless tourists fall through the crust and have a bad day. Exciting.

Chan managed to get the hire car $171, rather than £171 as listed on Europcar's UK website. And the getting up early meant we got three days' worth of careering about for two days of car, so that was nice.  It's busy in Chantelle's head.  I'm just here to drive and lift things.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben die Atacama-Wüste gereist. Es ist die trockenste Wüste der Welt, sondern ist die Heimat von vielen Lamas und Flamingos.
Die nahe gelegenen Geysire sind spektakulär, aber wir mussten sehr früh aufstehen, um sie zu sehen. Es war sehr kalt. Wir besuchten auch eine astronomische Institut und blickte zu den Sternen. Die Wüste, ohne all die Lichter der Stadt, ist sehr gut für Sternbeobachtung.