Up the Creek with 7 Paddles

Hot thermal areas, bubbling mud pools and brightly coloured volcanic mineral waters make Rotarua one of very few places on earth where you can experience the power of mother nature so close to the surface. At 10:15 sharp we crowded around the thermal parks prize attraction “The Lady Knox Geyser” pronounced GUY-ZER not geezer, which is apparently an old man with two legs, or geisha an upper-class Japanese mistress.  

With a little assistance from some magical soap powder the Geyser soon began foaming then spouting its water high into the air. Sure enough the wind changed and we were treated to a special Geyser shower as the water rained down.

The park at Wai-O-Tapu has a range of interesting geothermal wonders, some of which came up pretty nicely in Jed’s photos. 

 

After a bite to eat in Rotarua we packed some swimmers and a towel as we’d booked up an afternoon of Grade 5 white water rafting, the highest grade there is in the world. Picked up from the Tourist Office in the town we met our Japanese safety canoeist and then our rafting guide Mike. He was pretty cavalier and again I got the skeptical impression, as I normally do with these kind of things, that this guy was a cowboy and it was probably his first day on the job. Again, as usual I was totally wrong and the guy turned out to be an absolute legend. 

There was the four of us and a Japanese couple who couldn’t speak much English. As we were getting our safety briefing I could see they were looking a little confused but then totally out of the blue Mike began instructing them in Japanese which was just awesome. I’m always amazed when people whose first language is English can seamlessly slip into a foreign language, especially Japanese! Suddenly I felt totally confident in our guide.

We dumped our raft in the river and after about 3 minutes with no warning we launched off a 3 meter waterfall whilst still receiving basic safety instructions. 

Jed and I sat at the front bearing the full blow of the white water and the spine crunching compression of a raft full of rowers. Awesome. Our main waterfall would be 7 meters high, the highest waterfall that you can raft as a tourist in the world. We were briefed on what to do if the raft was to flip and told that this only happens on average once in every 10 times. If we’d been going skydiving and I was told that 1 in 10 chutes normally doesn’t open I’d almost certainly have chucked the towel in!

Then we were off. Forward paddle, backwards paddle, paddling chaos everywhere until before we knew it we plunged off the big one. Pictures are below. Enjoy :-)