February 25, 2014
We had time to visit one more area before our boat outing: the Blue and Green Lakes. The Blue Lake gets its color from its whitish pumice bottom, while the Green Lake has a sandy bottom. Both lakes are close enough together to share a lookout, the Blue and Green Lakes Lookout, which sits on a hill between the two lakes.
Before we arrived at the lookout, we were able to detour to the Blue Lake for a close-up look. The lake didn’t seem especially blue but was lovely nonetheless. Its still water was surrounded by densely-forested hills and a gravely beach that was strikingly white. It looked like a terrific place to enjoy a picnic and some swimming. Below a panorama photo (click on any photo to enlarge).
Next up was the Blue and Green Lakes Lookout, which had a good view of both lakes.
And some panoramas…
We decided we’d like a closer view of the Green Lake and hiked down a very bushy trail to try to get near it. The Maori people consider it sacred; so it’s not open for recreational use and not very accessible. We got as close as we could but it wasn’t a particularly good place for taking photographs. The lake was greenish, but not in a remarkable way. Still, it had been an interesting walk through some pretty native bush forest. (You can see just how bushy it was in the photo of Rich walking through.)
As it turned out, this was to be our final nature outing for the day as our boat trip got canceled. We didn’t mind—we took them up on their offer to go the next day. So we headed back towards town and ran into some surprise traffic. What could cause traffic at this time of day, an accident? No, it turned out thick steam was coming up from under the right turn lane, now coned off. Uh, did this concern anyone other than us? This whole area is a thermal hotbed, and we had to wonder if there was any danger of it suddenly escalating. It’s unnerving to have to drive around spewing steam suddenly coming up from the ground. Hopefully someone, somewhere, monitors these things.
Back in town, we decided to walk around. Rotorua has a look typical for New Zealand towns: a small central area with one or two main streets lined with low buildings. The street level is lined with small businesses, cafes, and a bank or two. There are generally roundabouts instead of traffic lights and stop signs, which work really well.
Some New Zealand towns lack charm with large, brightly-colored signs for the businesses and a strip-mall feeling. Others, though, stick to a theme and manage to be quite attractive, keeping the business signs small and tasteful. Rotorua tends to slide into the less-charming end of the scale, but we discovered something new: a covered promenade, about a block long, filled with restaurants. It was attractive, well designed, and gave the town some needed oomph. This town probably sees about every tourist in the known universe come through, yet it remains surprisingly small and relatively low key. It’s nice to see them do something special like this. Below, some photos around of the town and the promenade.
We decided to have an early dinner at a local institution called the Fat Dog Cafe. We enjoyed its funky colorful decor, good food, and a refreshing local Mata beer. Below, photos of the restaurant, which as you can see has a lot of character.
Heading back to the hotel for awhile, we waited for sunset to head to the Polynesian Spa. The spa sits next to Lake Rotorua and contains a series man-made pools fed by natural mineral hot springs. There are a couple of areas of pools, and we chose the central Pavilion Pools with eight pools of various sizes, temperatures, and degrees of alkalinity/acidity. One of them had a particularly nice view of the lake—naturally this one was the most crowded.
After changing into our bathing suits, we tested about 3 pools before finding one at our favorite temperature. It felt great to soak awhile in the hot water, then try some of the other pools when we either wanted to cool off or warm up. After taking a swim in the big pool, we finally saw an opening in the lakeside pool and grabbed it, soaking and enjoying a view of the lake as dusk turned to dark, a lovely way to end our evening.
If we ever come back, we’d arrive later to avoid peak-crowd sunset time and spend a bit more money to do the deluxe lake spa pools, all with lake views and probably much fewer people.
We had finished the Polynesian Spa but not our hot water soaking. It turned out a feature of our hotel room was a fairly large Jacuzzi in its own little tiled room. The room was very plain but had big windows looking out onto the grounds around the hotel. I filled the Jacuzzi with soakably-hot water and Rich brought in a bottle of wine.
We sat for awhile, sipping wine while enjoying the view of eucalyptus tree branches lit from below. It was a great end to what turned out to be a really nice day. After all this hot water soaking, we had a great night’s sleep. With both our “E ticket” attractions now back to back, tomorrow would be a full day. –Cyndi
