Hamilton Gardens, "Taking the Cure" in Rotorua, and Thermal Wonders

02Jul08
Hamilton to Rotorua

High-tailed it out of our unfriendly holiday park, stopped for a quick daylight viewing of the Riff Raff statue,



and then headed to the grand Hamilton botanical gardens.



The gardens turned out to be not so grand, especially the “Paradise Garden Collection” section which consisted of poorly-designed small themed gardens such as the underwhelming “Japanese Garden of Contemplation”, the extensively hardscaped “Indian Char Bagh Garden” with only poppies in the beds (what does that imply?) and our favorite, the “American Moderist Garden” consisting of a swimming pool, modern art sculptures and a picture of Marilyn Monroe! Where's the “garden” in that?



Hamilton obviously spent a lot of money on these gardens, but we were not impressed. And the fact that tour buses of Asians were being taken to these poorly rendered gardens was laughable. Fortunately the rest of the large botanical park was more traditional and much nicer, with an inviting hothouse that we got trapped inside during a torrential downpour.



After the gardens, we drove to Rotorua. It was raining pretty solidly by then, so we just checked in early at the holiday park and took advantage of their thermally-heated mineral spa. Rotorua is known for its geothermal activity and so all the accomodations have thermal pools for guests. This pool was outside, but under a roof so it was nice to relax and boil ourselves in the spa while watching the rain. The park even had naturally thermal-heated tent sites! Of course, the downside is that the whole town stinks of sulphur :)


03Jul08
Rotorua to Turangi

We spent the morning in the Rotorua museum which was fairly interesting.



The building used to house a fancy Victorian Bath House, where people from around the world came for treatments (called “taking the cure”) or just to enjoy the thermal mineral waters of Rotorua. The heavy mineral content of the water wreaked havoc on the Bath House – corroding everything in sight and causing constant upkeep, eventually closing the operation and leaving the building in ruins. The museum has one wing dedicated to the Bath House museum with some of the remaining fixtures and tiles.



It tells all about how mineral water treatments were high science and thought to cure everything in the world with many variations of treatment, from mud to electrified baths.



The other half of the museum has a nice Maori exhibit and details on the devastating Tarawera volcanic eruption of 1886 that buried entire villages and the famous Pink and White Terraces – a beautiful area of mineral deposits forming cascading terraces (like at Yellowstone).

Rotorua is one huge tourist trap so we didn't want to see much here, but we did want to take in some of the thermal landscape so we headed to the Wai-O-Tapu thermal park – which seemed a little less touristy than most. The park is similar to Yellowstone with geysers, boiling mud, colored thermal pools and mineral concretions.






We enjoyed walking around and seeing it all, but about three-quarters of the way through it started to pour down rain and we had to run back to the car. We were completely and thoroughly soaked (we might as well have jumped in one of the pools!) So we changed clothes and headed to a hostel in Turangi. We drove past Lake Taupo which is supposed to be beautiful, but in the heavy rain we couldn't see much.

Hamilton photoset
Rotorua photoset