Nobody lives here

It’s late and we’re totally wiped after a full day of tramping here and there in the Lake Taupo region. The most amazing thing we did was to pay $60 for the smelliest, ugliest walk I’ve ever taken—and it was totally worth it. We left New Zealand’s verdant hills and landed, somehow, in Mars—or at least a close replica of Mars called Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland (http://www.geyserland.co.nz/index.htm). The Taupo region is one of the most active thermal regions in the world, and there are things here I’ve never even imagined seeing before. We saw geysers and boiling mud and steaming waters with pools of bright yellow, orange, and green—all minerals leeching out of the rocks from water that is as hot as 300 degrees Celsius. And all of it was billowing steaming clouds of sulphur. We took dozens of pictures, most of them hideously ugly—barren earth with steaming sinkholes into which you can peer to find boiling mud. Yum. Sad for you that we couldn’t get the smell to show up over the internet, too.

For all of its ugliness, it was stunning, too. Magnificent, awesome—any word you can think of for forces well beyond your understanding. And somehow beautiful in it’s ugly way. It was easily like being in another planet, where you didn’t know whether the water was salty or fresh, whether it would cool you down or burn your hand off if you touched it. We saw birds landing on the steaming lake which bubbled at the edges, and we wondered whether they’d be cooked right in front of us. But they weren’t.

All that boiling, steaming, hissing water found its way to a stream and then to a waterfall which tumbled in an eerie whiteness and poured into a lake of actual emerald green. That deep green lake, surrounded by deeper green trees and with mountain peaks in the distance, was one of the most purely beautiful things I’ve ever seen. At the edges of the lake, the water sometimes steamed and boiled, and sometimes the trees were steaming, so you knew that this was still not your run-of-the-mill mountain scene. It was that combination, maybe, of trees and mountains and lake—such a classic beauty—with hints of steamy bubbling magic, that made the lake so extraordinary. I gulped it in, took too many pictures (none of which shows how beautiful it is but one of which is attached anyway) and hogged the viewing platform for longer than was strictly polite. Then we headed up through the native bush, away from the sulphery smell, and into clean green regular beauty. It quickly became impossible that we had seen what we had just seen—until we left the hill and climbed back down into the steaming plateau again and the earth changed from green and lush and life-filled to haunting and gaseous and boiling. Nobody could ever live here.

After we left Waiotapu behind, we found classic, stunning New Zealand beauty. Still, it was tinged, here in Taupo, with the unimaginable. We found the beautiful Aratiatia rapids—which have been harnessed by the power company here which uses NZ rivers to make NZ power (65% of North Island energy comes from these rivers, another 10% from the geothermal plants). When we got there at 3:50 through a lovely bush walk, the rapids were hardly rapid—just a small meandering stream bubbling through huge boulders. At 4:00, after three warning buzzers, the dam opened and the water poured out, and we watched the stream turn into a roaring rush, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, the giant boulders disappearing under raging ice blue water. The pastoral green stream banks with the general soft grasses and young trees were suddenly underwater, the man-made liminal zone suddenly roaringly apparent. What are these grasses and trees that survive the dunking that comes at regularly scheduled intervals (for tourist enjoyment, I think)—and more commonly in the summer than the less touristy winter? What kind of life finds its way in this tumultuous life—life as difficult as the thermal pools, but this time manmade and thus unnatural in its unworldlyness.

If yesterday was about feeling our way to be at home here, today was about finding a world where it is hard to imagine anyone at home, visiting a place so far from anything we’d imagined that it was hard to get our heads around it. It was a place for deeply respecting nature—not only because it’s beautiful and you should be gentle with it—but because it is bigger than you are and it will rapidly kill you if you step wrong, into roaring rapids or boiling mud.

Tomorrow we go home. And we’ve been talking about how it feels to all of us as though we’re about to go home to Washington, to Belmont Road. Who ever goes home to Paekakariki? New Zealanders, we suppose. And for a time, that seems to be what we are. So home we go, to our little cottage by the sea where the beauty is constant, and totally different, than the beauty, here in Taupo, five hours north.