BoomerGirl Diary

One of my main concerns about our trip to New Zealand was learning to drive on the left side of the road. It seemed it might be about as easy as starting to speak sentences backward.

I imagined and planned a slow adjustment period after getting the keys to our rental car. I would drive around the rental car parking lot several times, and then head to a nearby quiet neighborhood to practice staying in the right, I mean, correct lane. No such luck on the big day….

We acquired our strange new car with the steering wheel on the right at a rental agency in the middle of downtown Auckland. There was no parking lot. Our car appeared at a small garage door next to the rental office and we were handed the keys. It was a launch straight out into city traffic with the next rental car customer right behind us, wishing we’d get out of his way. So, I swerved out into the road and three blocks later merged onto a main state highway, and we lived to tell about it.

So far, the least dangerous but most annoying part of the conversion to the new driving experience is the turn signal. It is where the windshield wiper controls are on my car back home, and the wiper control is where the turn signal should be. This means that every time I change lanes or make a turn, I first turn on the wipers. This probably isn’t as helpful to my fellow drivers as a proper turn signal, but I’m hoping they will adjust. Perhaps if I attach some small flags on the ends of the wipers it will be a festive and friendly way of greeting those folks that I then suddenly turn in front of or cut off in traffic.

At any rate, we made our way to the city of Rotorua via our own flawed driving skills. Rotorua is in the center of New Zealand’s geothermally active zone. You can smell Rotorua long before you arrive due to the many venting fissures and fumaroles.

We never did get used to Rotorua’s aroma, but the nearby Whakarewarewa Forest gave us a respite during a 30-minute stroll through a serene stand of Californian Coastal Redwoods. These trees were planted in 1899 as part of an experiment to see which timber tree species could be grown successfully in New Zealand. Most of the varieties did not do well in this climate, but this group of redwoods has thrived.

Next on the agenda was a trip to the Waimangu Volcanic Valley. Here we took a 2-mile walk along an interesting variety of hot springs, craters, steaming vents, and silica stalactites. Our favorite part of this area was Frying Pan Lake.

This lake has bubbling mud and boiling water around its shore, and is constantly producing thin clouds of steam from its surface. We became almost mesmerized by the way this steam swirled and danced across the water! Some areas of the ground along the path grow crystals of sulphur and sulphates, and often the trail we walked seemed to radiate heat and potential violence.

We found that trails marked easy and flat actually required quite a bit of climbing up and down, and we were thankful that we had not headed up the path marked “Challenging”. (Shortly after this day of easy trekking, we saw a news report on New Zealand TV about a proposal to make various trails better marked and easier to travel. The expert quoted on this program said this is a bad idea and would only cause more un-physically fit folks to try the trails ... Which was an interesting viewpoint.) At the end of this walk there is a bus to take visitors back to the valley entrance, which we were very glad to see.

Tomorrow we head to Napier and Hawke Bay....