Bubbling mud pools, formed when hot water on its way up to the surface mixes with minerals and sediments.
Devil's Home collapsed crater
Devil's Inkpots; mud pools coloured by small amounts of graphite and crude oil
Artist's Palette; colourful mineral deposits from below the surface give this feature its name. The bubbling pool is a geyser.
The Devil's Bath, an amazing bright yellow pool that is naturally coloured by the minerals in the pool.
Lady Knox Geyser, near Wai-O-Tapu. The geyser is made to erupt every morning at 9.15 by dropping surfactant down the vent. This breaks the surface tension of the water inside the chamber and causes a plume of hot water and steam. The mound which the geyser erupts from is artificial, built by prisoners from the nearby prison in the 19th century after they discovered that the geyser made a good place for washing clothes.
Frying Pan Flat, with alluvial fans resulting from cliff rockfalls in the background and a yellow sulphurous deposit in the foreground.
The Champagne Pool, a bubbling, steaming hot spring with a bright orange petrified sinter edge. Utterly unique and very stunning!
Hot Water Beach
We also visited Hot Water Beach on the Coromandel Peninsula. On digging a hole in the sand, hot water bubbles up from under the sand to form a natural hot tub! It was very busy despite the fog and drizzle.
Huka Falls
On our way out of Rotorua we stopped briefly at Huka Falls, a beautiful cascade of turbulent ice-blue water.
The black covering on the rocks was made up of mussels that were growing there.
Farewell Spit
This narrow sand spit in Golden Bay on South Island is home to a lighthouse and a gannet colony and is only accessible by a daily guided tour.
Interesting formations on the side of a sand dune.
Fur seals with gannets flying overhead.
Farewell Spit Lighthouse, now automated but previously tended by three lighthouse keepers and their families.
The gannet colony.
An example of marram grass being used to stabilise the sand dunes.
The water here was over two metres deep, showing how clear the water actually is.
Pupu Springs is the legendary home of the female taniwha, Huriawa, one of the three main taniwha of Aotearoa. She is a diver of land and sea, travelling deep beneath the earth to clear blocked waterways. She is brave and wise and believed to still rest in the waters of Pupu Springs, when she is not away attending to business.
Looking up the glacier. Morainic debris, from landslides further up, can be seen on the right-hand side.
Looking down the glacier. The steep walls of the glacial trough carved out by the glacier when it was advancing in previous times are very visible. Alluvial fans can also be seen where rockfalls have occurred further down the valley.
Glacier guides have to carve out new steps every day, using ice axes. On the left is a crevasse.
Another group of tourists on the glacier.
A moulin, a hole in the ice leading to the base of the glacier by which meltwater can run off the surface of the glacier.
An ice pole embedded in the ice. Glaciers are unusual in that if you drop something down a crevasse or a moulin, it will probably turn up again a few days or weeks later when the ice has shifted. This pole had been lost the previous week.
