Rotorua

Rotorua is the top tourist destination in the central North Island. Most don’t go there for the smell, (although I quite like it), so it must be the spectacular scenery and the mineral-rich hot waters that draw people in. These have been created by volcanism that still burns deep beneath the city. There’s also an ever-burgeoning list of adventures, attractions and cultural events on offer.

About 230 km from Auckland and 80 km from Taupo, Rotorua sits at the edge of a lake that fills a huge volcanic caldera and the city is riddled with hot springs, craters, geysers and pools of bubbling mud. It’s at an elevation of about 300m on the north-eastern edge of the central volcanic plateau. This area was built up by hundreds of thousands of years of eruptions from the Taupo Volcanic Zone that underlies the land from Mount Ruapehu and Taupo, through Rotorua and out to steaming White Island off the coast.

Maori History

The local Maori are the Te Arawa tribes. According to tradition, they came from the ancestral homeland of Hawaiiki in the Te Arawa waka (canoe) and settled at first on the coast. Their tohunga (high priest), Ngatoro-i-rangi, created the region’s lakes by stamping his foot in the dry earth as he travelled inland to Lake Taupo and the mountains of Tongariro and Ruapehu. On the cold summit of Tongariro he was caught in a blizzard and called to his sisters in Hawaiiki to send him fire for warmth. It came under the sea and land, bursting out at White Island, Rotorua and Taupo before bringing the mountains to roaring eruption. It is this fire that still warms the land today.

Ihenga, the grandson of the canoe’s captain, explored the region and named the lakes. Travelling inland, he found Lake Rotoiti first, and called it Te Roto-iti-kite-a-Ihenga (The little lake discovered by Ihenga). Then he came to Lake Rotorua and named it Rotorua-nui-a-Kahu (The second big lake of Kahu), after his father-in-law, Kahu-mata-momoe. The Te Arawa tribes who followed him settled throughout the region, making good use of the thermal areas for cooking, bathing and heating, and over the centuries occasionally disputing territory and warring amongst themselves and with the neighbouring tribes from Waikato and Tauranga.

The 1820s through to the 1860s were a time of particularly violent turmoil and warfare for Te Arawa. In 1822, one sub-tribe made the mistake of killing visiting warriors from the Ngapuhi tribe. Ngapuhi controlled much of Northland, including the area around Russell, which was New Zealand’s first sizeable European port. This meant that Ngapuhi had access to Europeans and their technology, especially the new military technology of guns.

A Ngapuhi chief, Hongi Hika, had visited King George IV in Britain in 1820, helped a Cambridge Professor write a Maori language grammar and then picked up a few hundred muskets in Sydney on his way home. Hongi Hika used his muskets and the large number of warriors he could recruit with them to settle various old scores. In 1823, he came down the coast, up a river and had his men haul their great big sea-going war canoes kilometres through the bush so that he could attack Te Arawa’s island refuge of Mokoia in Lake Rotorua (centre top of picture). Te Arawa survived the attack, but their numbers were decimated. In the 1830s, European missionaries found the region embroiled in violent conflicts between sub-tribes and complained that their converts were all dying too quickly. Then, in the 1850s, there was warfare with neigbouring Waikato tribes after an Arawa warrior murdered a Waikato chief.

British colonial forces fought major battles with Ngapuhi in the 1840s and invaded the Waikato in the 1860s. So, during the conflict of the 1860s, Te Arawa allied with the colonial government against their tribal enemies. Because of this, Te Arawa did not suffer the immense punitive land confiscations that stripped ‘rebel’ Maori of their land. They still own a considerable amount of real estate in the region, most notably Mokoia Island, Mt Tarawera, the lakeside village of Ohinemutu, and Whakarewarewa – a spectacular thermal area with a thriving Cultural Centre and Arts & Crafts Institute, where they are now perhaps the most visible face of Maori culture in the New Zealand tourism industry.

Development

Tourism fuelled development. Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Alfred, set the trend in 1870 when he visited the Pink and White Terraces, bathed in hot springs for their health-giving properties, and enjoyed Maori feasts and cultural performances. It’s pretty much continued that way ever since, in spite of the 1886 eruption of Mt Tarawera that blew apart the renowned Pink and White Terraces and buried whole villages in metres of ash and mud. Survivors from the tribe which had guided visitors to the Pink and White Terraces resettled at Whakarewarewa and quickly got back into the tourism business there. The eruption had also opened up a new string of craters and thermal activity in the Waimangu valley that drew tourists – particularly an explosive geyser that blasted a black mixture of steam and rocks up to 400m in the air (Waimangu means black water). Even the buried village of Te Wairoa near Lake Tarawera is now a tourist attraction.

The road from Auckland was completed in 1884 and the railway ten years later. More accommodation and spa facilities were built and the forests were cleared, milled and in places replanted in pine trees. Farming didn’t do so well until scientists in the 1930s identified the cobalt deficiency in the soils of volcanic ash and began to remedy the problem. By that time, vast areas had been planted in Radiata pines that grow to maturity here in 25 years. The Kaingaroa forest between Rotorua, Taupo and the Ureweras was once the largest man-made forest in the southern hemisphere. Tourism, farming and forestry remain the principal industries of the Rotorua region, as they are for the whole of New Zealand really.

Geology

Rotorua’s hot springs are powered by the collision between two immense tectonic plates. Just east of the North Island, the dense sea-floor basalt of the Pacific plate slides down under the lighter continental crust of the Indo-Australian plate and continues to push forward while sinking at an angle underneath the North Island. When the sinking Pacific plate reaches a depth of about 80 km, it melts, and great streamers of red-hot lava come pushing their way up to the surface. A particular feature of New Zealand’s bit of crust is that it is not very thick, at about 15 – 20 km as opposed to the normal 35 – 45 km, so the effect of the rising magma is intensified. The Taupo Volcanic Zone follows the line where the descending plate hits 80 km down and the hot stuff comes up. This line actually extends under the sea all the way past Tonga to the equator, and is part of the ‘Ring of fire’ that encircles the Pacific. The volcanoes of the Phillipines and Japan, Mount St Helens in the USA, and the earthquakes of California are all part of this ring.

Most houses and businesses seem to have bores going down to tap the hot water for mineral pools and for heating. There were so many at one time that the water table dropped and thermal features such as the geysers at Whakarewarewa became less active. In the last few years, the city council has limited the use of bores and the water table has risen again. The geysers and bubbling mud pools are going strong, not just at Whakarewarewa, but also sometimes unexpectedly in suburban lawns and city parks with spectacular results. Most of Rotorua also smells strongly of hydrogen sulphide. It can accumulate in basements, especially by coming through faulty bores, and a few people have died from it over the years, but it’s rated as harmless to tourists.