Sunday was a lovely gentle day. Spent ages wandering along the beach at Ohope sorting through the heaps and heaps of driftwood twigs... My old headmaster at Walhampton always said I'd end up a beach-comber if I wasn't careful - well, I'd hate to dissappoint him!
Then in the afternoon I took a helicopter flight over to White Island - an active volcano. I was ever so slightly nervous, as I've never been in a 'copter before and wasn't sure about the vertigo aspect. In the end it was great, with only a slight lurch at takeoff and landing.
The island itself was quite amazing: this smoking cone sticking out of the Pacific Ocean... which we landed on and walked about for over an hour. Just four of us and the pilot, looking into mud ponds, the lake in the central crater itself, avoiding breathing the potentially dangerous fumes escaping out the rock all over the place (we had breathing masks with us - just in case). This is Nature at her most elemental - luckily she was in benign mood! Quite what we would have done if she'd decided to erupt on us I don't know - helicopters dont take off all that quickly from cold! Advice to scramble round to the outside of the crater was not very comforting! Well, as one of the other visitors said, it would at least have been a cheap cremation!
Yesterday was just spent wandering round Rotorua and today I'm writing this from the lovely lake-side town of Taupo - having spent an hour or so in a thermal bath on the way...
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