Mike Yardley: Hot & Steamy in Rotorua
(Photo / Supplied)
Sat, 17 Jul 2021, 12:21PM
Few New Zealand destinations offer such a therapeutic, embracing antidote to winter’s bracing chill quite like the geothermal dreamscape of Rotorua. The bubbling mud, hissing geysers and steaming hot springs was a most cathartic, multi-sensory change of scenery to warm my South Island cockles. It’s bewitching to gaze at all that steam, coiling like a phantom as it rises from the earth’s cracks – as compelling as Rotorua’s eggy, pervasive fragrance. The thrills are free at the gorgeously landscaped Kuirau Park, where it’s crater lake ensures the mud keeps boiling and the steam keeps huffing, at every turn. They’ve even developed some free hot footbaths at Kuirau Park, which I gleefully dipped my toes in, for a fleeting warm-up.