Holiday Eruptions !!

Hi All

Well the visit to Rotorua lived up to expectations. The land of the stink bomb !! Actually the smell of hydrogen sulphide was not too bad – if you stood up wind of the fumaroles !! I was expecting more of the volcanic landscape but it was so green. Many people had houses right in the thermal area (as it is called) and the fascination was that from time to time they found they has steam emanating from the their lawns and in some instances houses had to be moved from one side of the road to another because suddenly they had steam or bubbling mud pools in their gardens or appearing under their house. This is taken all in ones stride !!

Whoops the side of the mountain's gone !!

Sue and I took an air flight over the area of Rotorua to see, from the air, the crater and fault line of the last volcano to erupt (on land) in Rotorua and the photograph shows the extent of the crater formed. Deaths did occur as the seismic monitoring was virtually none existent in the 1800's but today the area is one of the most monitored areas by geologist. In one of the shots taken by Sue on video is a ‘hump’ on the side of the volcano which will become a new crater/volcano in the next 2000 years as geologists are measuring the growth of the dome to be 5 cm per annum.

Yes we did manage to see a geyser – but missed the big blow by minutes so the picture shows the little plume just minutes before the big one !! Blink and you can miss a lot !!

It's about to spout !!

Enough of the geologist stuff the town itself was a mixture of old and new buildings and has a crisscross of shopping streets some full of yes, you’ve guessed it souvenir shops, but others shops with the traditional ‘settler/colonial frontage. Most of the Administration Building were typically British in character with new building taking on the ‘wild west’ look !!

Now we are in the ‘Bay of Isands’ for three days R&R and from what we have seen already then ‘R&R’ it will be – but that will be another posting so for now it’s from Ian & Sue.