Natural Gases like the ones you and I can make!

Smelly Smelly Smelly Rotorua! If you are not one for foul eggy smells that you certainly are not one for Rotorua. This is the place that started New Zealand tourism, and yes, for its smells! Amongst other things too! Rotorua is the thermal land, where the Earths crust lays only 15,000 meters thick before you hit melting hot magma. Rotorua is a very beautiful town, and has a relatively relaxed atmosphere due to its abundancy of hot pools and spa resorts. However, wherever there are any of these hot springs, there is also a sulphurous smell about the place, and this can quickly spread to fill the air of the whole city. Standing next to some of the pools is enough to make you want to throw up!

The thermal villages are world renowned and the hot springs are still places of great importance. For the Maori people that centered themselves around this area, they soon depended on the hot water for culinary purposes and also treated them as luxury hotspots....no surprises there really! But be warned before you dip your toes in, some of these hotsprings if not most of them would actually scald you and scar you for life if you so much as had a droplet touch you! They are really hot and the sound of steam rumbling beneath rocks only prove to you that the Earth's might is small eruption away!

However, Rotorua also offers some of the best and purest of Spring Water in NZ. We went to visit one of these Springs - Rainbow Springs which is also where a trout and nature park is set up. Here we got a huge insight into New Zealand's native flora and of course the Silver Leaf Ferns, and also got to learn more about Maori culture in relation to the environment. We coupled this visit to the 'Kiwi Encounter' Sanctuary nearby where there is an on-going project to rejunivate the Kiwi population. This in itself was a great experience and we got to see these wonderful nocturnal creatures in their natural surrounds. Strange creatures really - flightless, very long beaks, , but cute nonetheless. For the wellbeing of the Kiwi's, you cannot take any photos of them, so you will have to make do with the taxidermies to get an idea of what they look like!

Natural Gases like the ones you and I can make!

Rotorua, New Zealand