New Zealand, Taupo: Making a Stepped Waterfall the Focus Instead of an Art Deco City

Huka Falls outside Taupo was an incredible stepped waterfall that had fast flowing water
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Taupo was about halfway between Wellington, New Zealand's capital city in the southern part of the North Island, and Auckland, the largest city in the country. Since we were making our way back up north on the island during the last few days we had planned to spend in the country, we thought it would be good to break up the journey with a few stops along the way, namely Napier, Huka Falls and Rotorua. During the drive to Napier, we toyed with the idea of visiting the place in New Zealand (a hill) with the longest name in the world (Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu), but decided we had been driving long enough on the two islands and wanted to keep trudging on to our final destination without any further diversions.

Eh? What was that you said? (ref: the "Deaf Assoc" sign in Rotorua)
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We had been touring around the country for 3-1/2 weeks in a campervan, and the thrill of the experience was starting to wear off as we neared the end of our month in New Zealand. Living in a cramped space for that period of time, and cooking most of our meals whilst on the road, was an experience we thoroughly enjoyed, but one that we were ready to complete, in anticipation of the next and last country we would visit in 2007 - Australia.

We noticed a sign stating that the area was closed, so we parked outside the entrance gate and hopped over it to check out the waterfall

Oh, my back. I can't carry this anymore! (ref: the "Age Concern" sign in Rotorua)
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The night before we left for Taupo, we had parked our campervan at the side of the highway in a large picnic area outside the town of Upper Hutt. When we woke up in the morning, we had pot noodles for breakfast - spicy barbecue beef flavoured ones - and took turns showering in the small shower inside the vehicle. We knew that a long journey was before us that morning, so we got back on the road after the showers.

To get to Taupo from the picnic area, we decided to take the long way there, via the east coast city of Napier, which occupied the land at the southern end of Hawkes Bay. Even though the area was renowned for sunshine, the weather had turned gray and cloudy when we arrived in the Art Deco city, and we couldn't find the motivation to walk around the city centre. Instead, we parked our campervan in the car park of a large supermarket and bought some groceries before cooking lunch.

This pretty cockerel was waiting for free handouts outside our campervan when we woke up in the morning at a picnic area outside Rotorua, halfway to Hamilton
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Lunch that day was pasta (surprise) with a Romano and garlic sauce on top, which Dan hated because of the stronger Romano cheese base, and some vegetables and herbs mixed in with some shredded mozzarella cheese that Kyle mistakenly purchased, thinking it would melt nicely in the same way that cheddar cheese melted. That was certainly not the case, as Dan can prove by explaining that he not only had to stomach the disgusting taste of the sauce, but also had to deal with extra stringy cheese that was glued to everything. It took us ages to clean the pots we used for cooking and the plates we ate on, as a result of the cheese!

Neither of us had ever seen a round pool table before, like this one in O'Malleys Irish Bar in Rotorua
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After eating lunch, we walked next door to the supermarket to see what was playing at the local cinema. There were only a couple of films being shown because the cinema was undergoing renovations, films that we had already seen, and we didn't see anything. The only thing left for us to do in Napier was to check out the small city centre and we did that by driving around and through it in our vehicle for a few minutes before agreeing to keep driving and make our way to Taupo.

The interesting thing about Napier was that pretty much the entire city centre had been redesigned in an Art Deco fashion in the 1930's after a terrible earthquake (7.9 on the Richter scale) demolished the city. We could see some similarities to Miami's South Beach area, and were really impressed with the number of beautiful and unique Art Deco buildings there. It was definitely not anything we expected to see in New Zealand!

Huka Falls emptied out into a small lake with a lot of power
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The region around Napier was known for wines; we had even tried a Hawkes Bay white wine a couple of weeks earlier (the one we had selected wasn't good - we preferred the Marlborough bottle of white that we shared). After toying with the idea of visiting a vineyard in the area, we dumped it in favour of continuing on with our journey back to Auckland via Taupo. We had already driven around 185 miles that day, to get from Upper Hutt to Napier, and it was still almost 100 miles from Napier to Taupo. We left Napier in the afternoon and arrived in Taupo just before 6:00pm, giving us enough time to see Huka Falls before dark.

This tree had unusual moss and lichen growing on its trunk
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The Maori word for Huka Falls was Hukanui, which means "Great Body of Spray". It was a fitting name for the waterfall, which was a great torrent of water, more like a giant rapid that plunges through a narrow cleft in the rock. The water at Huka Falls gushed over a series of natural stone steps and finally came to "rest" in a large pool at the bottom. The colour of the water was a beautiful turquoise, and the falls and pool were surrounded by native New Zealand forest with many ferns and other unique plants.

We had a disgusting plate of stale nachos with ketchup on them, instead of salsa, at O'Malleys Irish Bar in Rotorua!
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Just before we arrived at the Huka Falls car park, we had driven through the town of Taupo and took in amazing views of large Lake Taupo from our campervan. When we arrived at the Huka Falls car park, we noticed a sign stating that the area was closed, so we parked outside the entrance gate and hopped over it to check out the waterfall. A few other people had gotten the same idea, so we didn't feel bad about trespassing. There was a couple there, though, who probably didn't expect other tourists; we walked up on them snogging (that's the same as making out in the American English language) ferociously, and thought that they would have been better off in a hotel room in Taupo instead of at the falls.

The only thing in the Taupo area that we had wanted to see was Huka Falls because we had seen a picture of the natural wonder on a postcard when we were touring around the North Island of New Zealand a couple of weeks earlier. When we were finishing up our time in the South Island and working out our route to get back to Auckland from Wellington once we returned to the North Island, we decided to drive back via Taupo and check out Huka Falls. We felt satisfied with our visit and continued driving to Rotorua, where we had planned to have dinner and catch a film before driving on to Hamilton.

When we arrived in Rotorua, we parked our campervan in the town centre and immediately recognised the strong smell of sulphur, which we had gotten to know so well during our first visit there a few weeks earlier. We walked, trying to only breathe out of our mouths, to a pub called O'Malleys where we had what was possibly the worst meal of our entire year away from home, a disgusting plate of nachos. The tortilla chips they used were very stale, the toppings were extremely limited as far as quantity was concerned, and they stupidly covered the nachos with ketchup instead of salsa! To top that off, the ketchup was the horrible Wattie's brand, something that we both grew to detest in New Zealand, since it tasted N-A-S-T-Y, nasty. Be warned if you are travelling to New Zealand and are a ketchup fan because most places serve Wattie's instead of Heinz, even though the two brands share an almost identical label!

The film we watched at Reading Cinemas was "Fred Claus", but Kyle missed the first 15 minutes. He received an urgent text message from his sister and had to make some phone calls to Arkansas. He learnt about a terrible tragedy that evening; his dad (Leon) and stepmum's (Linda) house caught fire and they lost many personal possessions, and the house was destroyed. Luckily, neither Leon nor Linda was in the house at the time, so they were both fine, but it was a terrible event nonetheless. It was really wonderful that Kyle had already booked a trip back to the US for the week of Thanksgiving (you can read about the reasons for this in the Wellington journal entry before this one), and it was timely news for Leon and Linda to hear, since they had no idea he would be returning back to Arkansas for several days to see everyone.

After the film finished, we left Rotorua, but it had gotten late and very dark outside and we only made it halfway to Hamilton; we found a picnic area at the side of the road and made that our home for the evening. Dan had to reassure Kyle that everything was fine with the campervan after he raised his concern that the campervan would tip over in the middle of the night because we had parked on a slight slope. We didn't tip over, by the way, and managed to get out of the picnic area just fine the next morning, as we headed towards Auckland via the large city of Hamilton.