New Zealand – Day 14 – Tuesday, March 7th, 2017

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+19 light winds but the day started cool and we needed fleece and long pants.

The road today leads to Taupo home of the New Zealand Ironman which occurred just two days earlier.  Out of dozens of commercial tourist things to do today, we chose one that was less touristy than the rest such as The Prawn Park where families bond while fishing for the largest prawn in the artificial ponds, drove up, took a picture, drove away as we could not justify $49.00 a person but we would get to cook, peel and eat the ones we catch. Might go away hungry.

So we selected Wai-o-Tapu Thermal Wonderland which with the inclusion of “Wonderland” is not touristy at all. Oh, not entirely touristy except the geyser that always erupts at 10:15 a.m. but not today as we had to wait for the star of the show, the guy with the powdered soap to drop down inside of the geyser. Seems that the geyser does its own thing most of the time. Except when they want to collect about 300 tourists to sit in a theatre setting waiting like fools for the geyser to erupt. Who not realizing that someone needs to drop some powdered soap down the hole to force the eruption to occur. Surprise it went up 30 feet within minutes of adding the soap. Cash in the bank.

The park was very well done. We selected the longest route to follow and are happy that we had as it was well worth it.

The feature of this thermal is the variety of coloured pools. For reference the colours are as follows:

Green	Colloidal sulphur/ferrous salts
Orange	Antimony
Purple	Manganese oxide
White	Silica
Yellow-Primrose	Sulphur
Red-Brown	Iron oxide
Black	Sulphur and carbon

Some of the colours were very visible while others were harder to detect.

Another dinner of steamed green lip mussels, now our favourite.