Different Planet. Friday December 23rd

Different Planet.

Friday December 23rd

Today the kids slept past 6:30am!  I guess that is good, but considering they went to sleep almost three hours late, not so much.  After breakfast we took off for Wai-O-Tapu thermal wonderland on top of the volcanic dome of Maungakakaramea.  

It really feels like a different world from the time you enter.  You feel like you have been jettisoned to a different planet.  It is really great.  There is an orange algae that grows on the vegetation that is actually quite stunning next to the green vegetation and unusually colored rocks.

The area is covered in collapsed craters, boiling pools of mud, hot water springs, geysers, steam pools, and fumaroles.  A series of streams running underground are heated up to 300 C by magma left over from earlier eruptions.  The hot water absorbs minerals and out of the rocks as it passes up and they steam our in all sorts of different colors.  Some of the colors are 

green: sulphur and ferrous salts.

orange: antimony

purple: manganese oxide

white: silica

yellow: sulphur

red-brown: iron oxide

black: sulphur and carbon

That’s the good news!  Cool colors, weird formations, steaming gases, and bubbling mud.  The bad news is the hydrogen sulphide or rotten egg smell.  In some places it was really bad.  Brody seemed to be bothered the most by it.  The highlights were the Champagne Pool, Lady Knox Geyser, the Devil’s bath, bubbling mud pits, and the primrose terraces.  

They call it Wai-O-Tapu, we call it a different world!

Steam vents were everywhere, as were warnings of how hot it was.

The red is an algae.

Champagne lake (it is bubbling).

Don't want to swim here!

Amazing colors.

Lady Knox Geyser.

There she blows!

Bubbling mud pits.

Bubbling/spitting mud.

After lunch we went swimming in the hot water spring pool next to our hotel and then had a low key night to get ready for our early departure tomorrow.

Just as a side note, it is really hard to find napkins and/or paper towels.  No place we have stayed has had them.  Napkins here are for babies and feminine hygiene issues.  I finally found a package of napkins stuffed in the corner of one store and they are called, “commercial serviettes.”  Another thing we have noticed are road signs advertising “aged people.”  They are yellow signs with a black person on them warning you to drive carefully.  We are still adjusting to shopping here.  There is no such thing as low fat cheese and the labels for things at the grocery store are hard to adjust to especially when they are in unfamiliar units (milk comes in liters).  There is no “Morning Star Farms/vegetarian things here that we have seen which is hard for me!  We are enjoying the adventure to figure things out and try new things.  While we are talking about liters, gas here is priced per liter and very, very expensive.  It cost us $76 for half a tank of gas!  Ouch!  Mitsubishi is very popular here as are Honda and BMW.  We have seen a few 50’s style American cars but not much else.  We were sad to see (and you may be sad to hear) that KFC and McDonalds have a foot hold here as well.