My flight arrived in Taupo and I bid farewell to the Canadian family as I boarded a shuttle bus into town. The driver offered the other shuttle passenger and I door-to-door service and so he took me right to the campground where I was staying. Actually, it was not just a campground, it was called the Taupo All Seasons Holiday Park. The park offered not just camp sites, but caravan sites (campers), rooms in lodges and other facilities. Central to the park was a spacious kitchen and barbeque facilities that were well stocked and sparkling clean. The bathrooms were also cleaned several times and day and were immaculate. Clearly the park earned its five star rating and its only drawback was the twenty-five minute walk it took to get from the park into town.
I had rented a caravan which turned out to be a really fun experience. The park owners gave me bedding and showed me to my caravan. I had called the park to ask about one of their rooms because I had planned to spend all day Saturday on a difficult hike and wanted a place to myself to crash rather when I got back rather than a shared room. The park had not had any lodge rooms left, but offered me the caravan which turned out to be a neat treat. I had a space in the camper park for my little camper. I had three beds, a refrigerator and electric lights. I stowed my belongings in one of the cabinets and put together some sandwiches for lunch before wandering into town just in time to be caught in the rain.
The town of Taupo is located on the edge of Lake Taupo which fills a large volcanic crater and is the largest lake in NZ. The eruption of the volcano in 186 AD was so violent and so colossal that it blackened the sky in China and the Romans noted a reddening of the sky which helped geologist to later date the eruption. The Waikato River flows from the lake at one end of town and there is a large offering of boating and kayaking from the town. Taupo is also a good base for the exploration of the Tongariro National Park which lies about 50 km to the south.
Tongariro National Park owes its existence to the Tuwharetoa chief, Te Heu Heu Tukino IV who in the nineteenth century recognized that the only chance the Maori had to keep their sacred lands intact was to donate them to the nation on the condition that the land could not be settled or spoiled. The park that was created is dominated by three great volcanoes of Ruapehu, Tongariro and Ngauruhoe which rise from the desolate wasteland. Peter Jackson chose Mt. Ruapehu and the surrounding, desolate plateaus as the model for Mt. Doom for the Lord of the Rings. Mt Ruapheu is active with the last eruption occurring in 1996. The whole are was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.
The park is the location of a hike which has been described as the single most spectacular one day hike in all of New Zealand. The hike is called the Tongariro Crossing and it crosses over frozen lava flows a crater floor as well as running nearby geothermal areas and blue and red colored lakes. There is even an option to ascend to the cinder cones of one of the volcanoes. I had chosen the hike because I have never hiked on an active volcano before, let alone Mt. Doom. The day hike is done by being dropped off at one point and picked up at another several hours later. Some companies offer early shuttles where you are dropped off at 6:30 to try to beat the rush of the hundred or so hikers who walk the crossing each summer weekend day.
I wanted to take one of the early shuttles from Taupo to the crossing, but when I called the telephone number of the shuttle company, I only heard an answer machine message that there was bad weather along the crossing and that tours for the day were canceled. The messages were updated every few hours, but all were pessimistic. The information office in Taupo had short range weather reports which were no much cheerier. I wandered about the town, planning contingency plans if I could not hike the crossing the next day. I bought some groceries from the Woolworths and made the walk back to the campground.
In the evening, I called the tour company once more and actually reached a person. He told me that they were not running the early shuttle, but that they might be able to run the normal shuttle the next morning. I told him where I was staying and he told me that they would be there to pick me up at 6:20. However, I should call at 6:00 to check to make sure that they were going to make the run that day.
Since I was getting up really early, I opted to go to bed early. My bed was near the windows of the caravan and I woke up around 2AM to find the skies clear and full of stars. I contemplated going out and trying to find the Southern Cross, but sleep seemed the better option. Alas, the stars were gone when I woke up again to eat some breakfast and to pack my daypack with lunch and my gear. I called the company at 6AM and received bad news. The messaged told me that heavy squalls were occurring on the crossing and that I should go back to sleep which I did. I could have tried to go with another company, but as I had been told that trying to make the crossing in foul weather was pointless, I opted to not do so.
It was a bummer to have staked so much on making the hike and then not being able to do it. My whole schedule had been based on hiking that day and therefore I was missing other sites in New Zealand. But, if I had been able to hike, it would have been worth it.
Instead, I chose to hike along the Waikato River for a few hours. But first, I walked down to Taupo to make a booking to kayak on the river later that day which was silly since a simple phone call would have saved me an hour of walking. From the campground, I walked to a park and then followed a trail down to the river. As I neared the river, I saw steam rising from the vegetation. There was a bridge over a small stream of hot water which was fed by a thermal vent back in the vegetation. The water was hot and people were sitting in pools in the rocks or down where the hot stream met the cold river water. If one were to sit at the meeting of the stream and the river, one could adjust ones position until the temperature of the water was just bearably hot rather than really hot as it was further up the stream. There were signs warning people not to dunk their heads under the water because of the risk of catching bacterial meningitis, but some locals claim this is a farce.
In the distance I could see other plumes of steam rising above the trees. The whole area has thermal vents and nearby is a geothermal power plant. There is also a park called Craters of the Moon which was born when the geothermal plant was built and the natural plumbing under the ground was disturbed. Craters of the Moon is a geothermal area which offers pools of bubbling mud and hissing steam.
I continued past the bubbling stream and followed the path up the hill on the side of the river. It was the river which made the hike rewarding. From the cliffs above, one could look down at the crystal clear water and easily see the bottom. Some parts of the river were tinted topaz due to the sediment and the water was amazingly blue. By this time, I was really looking forward to kayaking later in the day!
I walked for a while until I came upon the Huka Falls which is a narrow, rock chasm which the river is funneled through before falling over a 10 meter high shelf. Although the drop is not high, the shear volume of water flowing though and the spectacular hues of blue make the falls a site worth seeing even if the river level is low. For a long time, no one dared try kayaking through the falls until one mad German made the attempt a few years ago.
As I stood on the cliffs above the falls, I heard a roar that announced the arrival of one of the jet boats which ply the river. Jet boating is a popular adventure sport because the drivers veer towards rocks and trees, turning away just in the nick of time. As the boats approached the falls, the drivers spun the high powered boats about in dizzying circles, much like a car spinning out on ice. There is also a company called Rapid Jet which offers a whitewater jet boating trip over an area of rapids further down the river. According to the Rough Guide, the entire boat gets airborne and the company makes no secret about having sunk three boats in the attempt to give the customers the most thrilling ride possible. The boats look neat, but it is a bit disappointing to hear the high power engines long before the boats appear as you hike through the otherwise quiet landscape.
From the falls, I had hoped to walk up to see the Craters of the Moon, but there was not a walking path. Instead I would have had to have spent an hour and a half walking on the side of a busy road and so instead I decided to continue walking along the river. My time was limited by the departure time of the kayak trip and so I never made it as far as the Aratiatia Dam further downstream. The Waikato River has several hydroelectric dams along its length and the water level is carefully controlled to keep the dams viable. The amount of water flowing into the river from Lake Taupo is controlled by a sluice gate and the Aratiatia Dam. Below the dam, the river is reduced to just a trickle running through the rocky river bed except for four times a day when the dams are opened. The opening of the dam changes the river from a trickle into a class five whitewater rafting course as the water surges and sprays over the rocks.
I turned around to hike back to the campground and was rewarded by lots of rain. I arrived at the campground much earlier than I expected and so I went into the kitchen to grab some water. I saw a family outside, eating at one of the covered picnic tables and said hello to which the father responded with a “hi”. As I was standing in the big kitchen, the father and his young daughter came in to prepare more food and I turned an ear to see if I could pick up words of the language that they were speaking. Sure enough, I started to recognize words, Danish words. I asked in Danish if they were Danish and the man confirmed that they were. I explained, still in Danish that I had lived in Denmark for a while. He told me that they were from outside of Kolding in Jutland and I responded that I had been their neighbor to the north when I worked at Grundfos. However, my Danish only took us so far and we switched into English for the rest of the conversation. His daughter must have reported to the rest of the family that they had met a Danish man because his young son came in to listen. Eventually the son asked his father in Danish why we were speaking in English if I were Danish which I found humorous and his father explained to him that I only knew a little Danish.
I asked how long they would be in NZ and the man explained that he, his wife and their children were currently on a nine month trip which they had started last September. They had started in South America where the adults had spent their first month taking Spanish classes. They had lived with a local family in their home and so between the several hours of Spanish classes each day and conversations with the host family, their knowledge of Spanish grew quickly. From South America, they had come to New Zealand where they would be spending some time. From New Zealand, they would go to South Africa before returning to Denmark.
He explained that for the children, the whole trip was an amazing experience. They were being exposed to different ways of doing things and different cultures, particularly in South America. The children had begun to ask why people that they met did things differently than they did in Denmark. Or the children saw things that they liked and would ask why people in Denmark did not do things that way. The whole trip was broadening their horizons and was a tremendous learning experience.
The man reported that NZ was not that much different than Denmark in the quality of life or the way that things were done. However, he said that people were a lot more friendly in NZ than in Denmark, especially in the cities as compared to Danish cities. People would say hello to each other which was a big difference from Denmark.
I asked how they were able to take off the time for the trip. The man explained that he is a school teacher in Denmark and he had taken off the school year which is why they had left Denmark at the start of the school year. He just could not take off in the middle of the school year because it would have been disruptive to his students. His wife was currently between jobs. During the trip, they were home schooling their children so that they would be able to travel, yet would not fall behind their schoolmates in Denmark. He explained that in Denmark, there is a system in which you are allowed to take a sabbatical the length of which is determined by the number of children that you have. During the sabbatical, the Danish government would pay them a stipend which covered the cost of their mortgage payments and their other financial obligations in Denmark.
After my conversation with the Danish family, I have decided upon the course of my future. I now see that I was foolish to leave Denmark. What I intend to do is to return to Denmark, marry a nice Danish woman who enjoys to travel (which is not a difficult trait to find) and to have enough children to take a long sabbatical to travel the globe while the Danish state pays our bills.
Now confident about my future plans, I bid farewell to the Danish family and walked down to the kayak shop. The people in the shop were really friendly and had when it had been raining, they had considered allowing those who had signed up for the trip to cancel and take a trip the following day. However, the group consisted of a man from the UK and myself and we were both eager to go rain or not. Our guide met us in the shop and gave us nylon jackets to wear to keep us warm if it did rain again. We walked down to the river where we found our plastic kayaks waiting for us in a trailer. We put on our life preservers (they called them something different, but I can not remember the name) and dragged our kayaks into the river (the benefit of plastic is that they can be dragged). As both the other man and I have kayaked before, we did not need much instruction and just leisurely made our way down the river as the sun broke through the clouds, giving us a glorious day.
The man from the UK was competing with me for the shortest length trip to NZ. He was only in the country for a week during a short holiday from his job. He used to be in the Royal Air Force, but now flew commercial jets for a charter company in the UK. The British company was currently contracted by Garuda the Indonesian airline for chartered flights from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world and so a great number of jets and pilots were needed. The man explained that the cost of the trip could be in excess of $4000 which was more than a lot of people earn in a year. So what a lot of villages in Indonesia will do is to collective save money all year so that one person from the village can make the required pilgrimage. The pilot told us that the King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah, near Mecca is an amazing sight to see. You have these huge, 747s arriving from all over the world at the rate of one a minute at the start of the Hajj. The airport itself is only open for six weeks a year and can accommodate 80,000 people at one time. The length of the pilgrimage is a little over a week which is why the pilot was currently on holiday. Once the Hajj ended, he would again fly his jet back and forth from Indonesia until everyone was back.
New Zealand is the birthplace of commercial bungy jumping and after a short paddle, we came across as part of the river with a tall, stone cliff on one side. One enterprising company had set up a bungee jump by extending a platform out over the river. People would jump off and would be collected by boat once they stopped bouncing up and down. Our guide explained that it cost $135 for each jump. The rope was good for 500 jumps and they had about 160 people make the leap each day. We watched several jumps and our guide explained the proper way to jump since we saw lots of bad jumps. For example, we saw one woman jump feet first which meant that she was whipped about at the bottom as the bungee cord was extended. The proper way to jump is to go head first in a dive. Sometimes the operators will get the length of the bungee cord just right and we saw one man get his head wet in the river before the bungee cord pulled him back up.
We got out of our kayaks and swam in the cold, blue water until we came up on the thermal vent where we hung out in the hot water for a while. From the natural hot tub, we paddled downstream for a while before we took out before we got to the waterfall. The take out was located at a campground which is free to use with the condition that campers not spend extended lengths of time in the free sites. There was a group of guys hanging out near the river and they just nicely wandered down and helped us to carry our kayaks up to the waiting van and trailer. We got into the van and drove off and the guys went back to drinking beer and hanging out.
The kayaking trip was a lot of fun and afterwards I went back up to the campsite for dinner. In the kitchen, I met a retired couple from Colorado who saw my Lehigh t-shirt and asked if I had gone there. The couple had once taught in Darwin for some time and were now touring NZ before going to Darwin to meet up with old friends.
I bid goodnight and went back to my caravan to crash for the night.
I had rented a caravan which turned out to be a really fun experience. The park owners gave me bedding and showed me to my caravan. I had called the park to ask about one of their rooms because I had planned to spend all day Saturday on a difficult hike and wanted a place to myself to crash rather when I got back rather than a shared room. The park had not had any lodge rooms left, but offered me the caravan which turned out to be a neat treat. I had a space in the camper park for my little camper. I had three beds, a refrigerator and electric lights. I stowed my belongings in one of the cabinets and put together some sandwiches for lunch before wandering into town just in time to be caught in the rain.
The town of Taupo is located on the edge of Lake Taupo which fills a large volcanic crater and is the largest lake in NZ. The eruption of the volcano in 186 AD was so violent and so colossal that it blackened the sky in China and the Romans noted a reddening of the sky which helped geologist to later date the eruption. The Waikato River flows from the lake at one end of town and there is a large offering of boating and kayaking from the town. Taupo is also a good base for the exploration of the Tongariro National Park which lies about 50 km to the south.
Tongariro National Park owes its existence to the Tuwharetoa chief, Te Heu Heu Tukino IV who in the nineteenth century recognized that the only chance the Maori had to keep their sacred lands intact was to donate them to the nation on the condition that the land could not be settled or spoiled. The park that was created is dominated by three great volcanoes of Ruapehu, Tongariro and Ngauruhoe which rise from the desolate wasteland. Peter Jackson chose Mt. Ruapehu and the surrounding, desolate plateaus as the model for Mt. Doom for the Lord of the Rings. Mt Ruapheu is active with the last eruption occurring in 1996. The whole are was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.
The park is the location of a hike which has been described as the single most spectacular one day hike in all of New Zealand. The hike is called the Tongariro Crossing and it crosses over frozen lava flows a crater floor as well as running nearby geothermal areas and blue and red colored lakes. There is even an option to ascend to the cinder cones of one of the volcanoes. I had chosen the hike because I have never hiked on an active volcano before, let alone Mt. Doom. The day hike is done by being dropped off at one point and picked up at another several hours later. Some companies offer early shuttles where you are dropped off at 6:30 to try to beat the rush of the hundred or so hikers who walk the crossing each summer weekend day.
I wanted to take one of the early shuttles from Taupo to the crossing, but when I called the telephone number of the shuttle company, I only heard an answer machine message that there was bad weather along the crossing and that tours for the day were canceled. The messages were updated every few hours, but all were pessimistic. The information office in Taupo had short range weather reports which were no much cheerier. I wandered about the town, planning contingency plans if I could not hike the crossing the next day. I bought some groceries from the Woolworths and made the walk back to the campground.
In the evening, I called the tour company once more and actually reached a person. He told me that they were not running the early shuttle, but that they might be able to run the normal shuttle the next morning. I told him where I was staying and he told me that they would be there to pick me up at 6:20. However, I should call at 6:00 to check to make sure that they were going to make the run that day.
Since I was getting up really early, I opted to go to bed early. My bed was near the windows of the caravan and I woke up around 2AM to find the skies clear and full of stars. I contemplated going out and trying to find the Southern Cross, but sleep seemed the better option. Alas, the stars were gone when I woke up again to eat some breakfast and to pack my daypack with lunch and my gear. I called the company at 6AM and received bad news. The messaged told me that heavy squalls were occurring on the crossing and that I should go back to sleep which I did. I could have tried to go with another company, but as I had been told that trying to make the crossing in foul weather was pointless, I opted to not do so.
It was a bummer to have staked so much on making the hike and then not being able to do it. My whole schedule had been based on hiking that day and therefore I was missing other sites in New Zealand. But, if I had been able to hike, it would have been worth it.
Instead, I chose to hike along the Waikato River for a few hours. But first, I walked down to Taupo to make a booking to kayak on the river later that day which was silly since a simple phone call would have saved me an hour of walking. From the campground, I walked to a park and then followed a trail down to the river. As I neared the river, I saw steam rising from the vegetation. There was a bridge over a small stream of hot water which was fed by a thermal vent back in the vegetation. The water was hot and people were sitting in pools in the rocks or down where the hot stream met the cold river water. If one were to sit at the meeting of the stream and the river, one could adjust ones position until the temperature of the water was just bearably hot rather than really hot as it was further up the stream. There were signs warning people not to dunk their heads under the water because of the risk of catching bacterial meningitis, but some locals claim this is a farce.
In the distance I could see other plumes of steam rising above the trees. The whole area has thermal vents and nearby is a geothermal power plant. There is also a park called Craters of the Moon which was born when the geothermal plant was built and the natural plumbing under the ground was disturbed. Craters of the Moon is a geothermal area which offers pools of bubbling mud and hissing steam.
I continued past the bubbling stream and followed the path up the hill on the side of the river. It was the river which made the hike rewarding. From the cliffs above, one could look down at the crystal clear water and easily see the bottom. Some parts of the river were tinted topaz due to the sediment and the water was amazingly blue. By this time, I was really looking forward to kayaking later in the day!
I walked for a while until I came upon the Huka Falls which is a narrow, rock chasm which the river is funneled through before falling over a 10 meter high shelf. Although the drop is not high, the shear volume of water flowing though and the spectacular hues of blue make the falls a site worth seeing even if the river level is low. For a long time, no one dared try kayaking through the falls until one mad German made the attempt a few years ago.
As I stood on the cliffs above the falls, I heard a roar that announced the arrival of one of the jet boats which ply the river. Jet boating is a popular adventure sport because the drivers veer towards rocks and trees, turning away just in the nick of time. As the boats approached the falls, the drivers spun the high powered boats about in dizzying circles, much like a car spinning out on ice. There is also a company called Rapid Jet which offers a whitewater jet boating trip over an area of rapids further down the river. According to the Rough Guide, the entire boat gets airborne and the company makes no secret about having sunk three boats in the attempt to give the customers the most thrilling ride possible. The boats look neat, but it is a bit disappointing to hear the high power engines long before the boats appear as you hike through the otherwise quiet landscape.
From the falls, I had hoped to walk up to see the Craters of the Moon, but there was not a walking path. Instead I would have had to have spent an hour and a half walking on the side of a busy road and so instead I decided to continue walking along the river. My time was limited by the departure time of the kayak trip and so I never made it as far as the Aratiatia Dam further downstream. The Waikato River has several hydroelectric dams along its length and the water level is carefully controlled to keep the dams viable. The amount of water flowing into the river from Lake Taupo is controlled by a sluice gate and the Aratiatia Dam. Below the dam, the river is reduced to just a trickle running through the rocky river bed except for four times a day when the dams are opened. The opening of the dam changes the river from a trickle into a class five whitewater rafting course as the water surges and sprays over the rocks.
I turned around to hike back to the campground and was rewarded by lots of rain. I arrived at the campground much earlier than I expected and so I went into the kitchen to grab some water. I saw a family outside, eating at one of the covered picnic tables and said hello to which the father responded with a “hi”. As I was standing in the big kitchen, the father and his young daughter came in to prepare more food and I turned an ear to see if I could pick up words of the language that they were speaking. Sure enough, I started to recognize words, Danish words. I asked in Danish if they were Danish and the man confirmed that they were. I explained, still in Danish that I had lived in Denmark for a while. He told me that they were from outside of Kolding in Jutland and I responded that I had been their neighbor to the north when I worked at Grundfos. However, my Danish only took us so far and we switched into English for the rest of the conversation. His daughter must have reported to the rest of the family that they had met a Danish man because his young son came in to listen. Eventually the son asked his father in Danish why we were speaking in English if I were Danish which I found humorous and his father explained to him that I only knew a little Danish.
I asked how long they would be in NZ and the man explained that he, his wife and their children were currently on a nine month trip which they had started last September. They had started in South America where the adults had spent their first month taking Spanish classes. They had lived with a local family in their home and so between the several hours of Spanish classes each day and conversations with the host family, their knowledge of Spanish grew quickly. From South America, they had come to New Zealand where they would be spending some time. From New Zealand, they would go to South Africa before returning to Denmark.
He explained that for the children, the whole trip was an amazing experience. They were being exposed to different ways of doing things and different cultures, particularly in South America. The children had begun to ask why people that they met did things differently than they did in Denmark. Or the children saw things that they liked and would ask why people in Denmark did not do things that way. The whole trip was broadening their horizons and was a tremendous learning experience.
The man reported that NZ was not that much different than Denmark in the quality of life or the way that things were done. However, he said that people were a lot more friendly in NZ than in Denmark, especially in the cities as compared to Danish cities. People would say hello to each other which was a big difference from Denmark.
I asked how they were able to take off the time for the trip. The man explained that he is a school teacher in Denmark and he had taken off the school year which is why they had left Denmark at the start of the school year. He just could not take off in the middle of the school year because it would have been disruptive to his students. His wife was currently between jobs. During the trip, they were home schooling their children so that they would be able to travel, yet would not fall behind their schoolmates in Denmark. He explained that in Denmark, there is a system in which you are allowed to take a sabbatical the length of which is determined by the number of children that you have. During the sabbatical, the Danish government would pay them a stipend which covered the cost of their mortgage payments and their other financial obligations in Denmark.
After my conversation with the Danish family, I have decided upon the course of my future. I now see that I was foolish to leave Denmark. What I intend to do is to return to Denmark, marry a nice Danish woman who enjoys to travel (which is not a difficult trait to find) and to have enough children to take a long sabbatical to travel the globe while the Danish state pays our bills.
Now confident about my future plans, I bid farewell to the Danish family and walked down to the kayak shop. The people in the shop were really friendly and had when it had been raining, they had considered allowing those who had signed up for the trip to cancel and take a trip the following day. However, the group consisted of a man from the UK and myself and we were both eager to go rain or not. Our guide met us in the shop and gave us nylon jackets to wear to keep us warm if it did rain again. We walked down to the river where we found our plastic kayaks waiting for us in a trailer. We put on our life preservers (they called them something different, but I can not remember the name) and dragged our kayaks into the river (the benefit of plastic is that they can be dragged). As both the other man and I have kayaked before, we did not need much instruction and just leisurely made our way down the river as the sun broke through the clouds, giving us a glorious day.
The man from the UK was competing with me for the shortest length trip to NZ. He was only in the country for a week during a short holiday from his job. He used to be in the Royal Air Force, but now flew commercial jets for a charter company in the UK. The British company was currently contracted by Garuda the Indonesian airline for chartered flights from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world and so a great number of jets and pilots were needed. The man explained that the cost of the trip could be in excess of $4000 which was more than a lot of people earn in a year. So what a lot of villages in Indonesia will do is to collective save money all year so that one person from the village can make the required pilgrimage. The pilot told us that the King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah, near Mecca is an amazing sight to see. You have these huge, 747s arriving from all over the world at the rate of one a minute at the start of the Hajj. The airport itself is only open for six weeks a year and can accommodate 80,000 people at one time. The length of the pilgrimage is a little over a week which is why the pilot was currently on holiday. Once the Hajj ended, he would again fly his jet back and forth from Indonesia until everyone was back.
New Zealand is the birthplace of commercial bungy jumping and after a short paddle, we came across as part of the river with a tall, stone cliff on one side. One enterprising company had set up a bungee jump by extending a platform out over the river. People would jump off and would be collected by boat once they stopped bouncing up and down. Our guide explained that it cost $135 for each jump. The rope was good for 500 jumps and they had about 160 people make the leap each day. We watched several jumps and our guide explained the proper way to jump since we saw lots of bad jumps. For example, we saw one woman jump feet first which meant that she was whipped about at the bottom as the bungee cord was extended. The proper way to jump is to go head first in a dive. Sometimes the operators will get the length of the bungee cord just right and we saw one man get his head wet in the river before the bungee cord pulled him back up.
We got out of our kayaks and swam in the cold, blue water until we came up on the thermal vent where we hung out in the hot water for a while. From the natural hot tub, we paddled downstream for a while before we took out before we got to the waterfall. The take out was located at a campground which is free to use with the condition that campers not spend extended lengths of time in the free sites. There was a group of guys hanging out near the river and they just nicely wandered down and helped us to carry our kayaks up to the waiting van and trailer. We got into the van and drove off and the guys went back to drinking beer and hanging out.
The kayaking trip was a lot of fun and afterwards I went back up to the campsite for dinner. In the kitchen, I met a retired couple from Colorado who saw my Lehigh t-shirt and asked if I had gone there. The couple had once taught in Darwin for some time and were now touring NZ before going to Darwin to meet up with old friends.
I bid goodnight and went back to my caravan to crash for the night.
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