The 315 km journey from Picton to Wellington via the ferry proved to take its toll in several ways, not least exhaustion and lack of sleep. I lost some ground in terms of recovery from Covid with a strong Positive Test on Friday morning but by the end of a less strenuous day I felt better, and we had a beautiful hotel on Lake Taupo (See photo). The dinner, however, took over 2 hours and by 9.30pm I was all in once again so sorry no posting.
We are now 2 full days further on and sadly, and annoyingly, I still have a faint positive test line even though I am not sneezing or coughing or experiencing shortness of breath, but I have lost my sense of smell, which proved to be beneficial when we visited the Thermal Springs this morning!
More on that visit in another post.
We have had an afternoon and evening at leisure for a change her in Rotorua, so I will try to get a couple of posts completed.
Lake Taupo is the largest freshwater lake in Australasia. It is roughly the size of Singapore and is the crater (Caldara) created by the Taupō Volcano began erupting about 300,000 years ago. It last erupted 1800 years ago and it's said to have been one of the most violent eruptions known in the world in the last 5000 years. The eruption plume reached 50 km into the air, so that all of NZ received at least 1cm of ash and areas near the lake were covered in more than 100 metres of eruption material.
Today, the lake marks the start of one of the many Hydroelectric Generation Schemes in New Zealand that supplies about 80% of its energy needs.
We arrived on Friday evening to Lake Taupo sparkling in the late evening sunlight but overnight the wind blew up and that meant that our cruise on the lake on Saturday morning had to be cancelled. Instead, we witnessed one of the most popular natural attractions in the North Island when millions of litres of water are released from the Aratiatia Dam creating an awe-inspiring transformation of a dry, rocky gorge into a roaring river, forming thundering, turquoise-coloured rapids over ancient volcanic remnants. The blue frothy, turbulent waters are caused by the creation of air bubbles in the massive flow of water.
I have a wonderful video but sadly that is too big to attach to this post, so I have borrowed an after photo.
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