Over the last two days, we have driven from Thames to eventually arrive in Rotorua. They have been two very different days – one travelling and the other visting scenic places around the city of Rotorua.
Our road trip took us through lush dairy farm land with occassional orchards of kiwi fruït and avocados. Not long after leaving Thames, we drove along the Karangahake Gorge and its old gold mining area.
The first sign of old activity was the double deck bridge across the river. The one-lane road bridge crosses under an old railway bridge that disappears right into a tunnel through the mountain. It’s now part of a modern bike trail.
Just around the next corner is the Karangahake rest area and the site of an old gold mining area. Payable gold was discovered here in the 1880s and in the years that followed three mines were opened on the mountainside.
A township stood here 80 years ago, part of it encroaching on the riverside area which now serves as recreation reserve. In its heyday Karangahake had a population of 2,000, with 480 children attending the school which still perches on the wooded slopes above the road. There were nine boarding houses and two hotels, one on each side of the river. The Tramway Hotel, established in 1880, was a two storied building with 30 rooms and stood on the river flat now occupied by a popular Gold Camp.
We made a stop for coffee in the little town of Katikati with its exceptionally busy main street. I found a bakery on the other side and risked my life getting across to it. (It would have been easier to use the pedestrian crossing but that was another forty metres down the road). The bakery was run by a Cambodian immigrant family. I have never seen such a mouth watering display of cakes, sandwiches, rolls, pies and focaccias as they had in their display cases. Gorgeous food!
Katikati has become known for its many murals painted on walls of commercial buildings. These were started in the 1990s to regenerate tourist interest in the town and district. They led to the town being recognised by the award of New Zealand’s ‘Most Beautiful Small Town’ in 2005.
Next, our drive took us through the city of Tauranga with its busy harbour. At the end of the town beach was Mount Manganui. This was the site of the sad January 22026 disaster when a landslide, after exceptionally heavy rain, came down on a caravan park, burying six people.
For the rest of the day, we continued on through farmland, although at one stage, our GPS took us away from the highway and along series of country roads. If it wasn’t for that we would not have come across the Oharoa Falls.
Rotorua, our destination, is in a gelogical hotspot. Google Maps clearly shows it as being situated on the side of Lake Rotorua (the caldera of an extinct volcano) and in a geological hot spot.
Today, we started with a visit to the thermal area of Whakawerawera. When we last visited here about thirty years ago, this was an open area by the roadsise into which you could just walk around on some roughly formed tracks. Tourism progress has since taken place and it now has a car park (with an overflow), cafe, restaurant, gallery, carving school and of course, a gift shop The entry fee has increased by a thousand-fold.
Our very expensive guided tour took us to the Maori Meeting Hall and then on to the workshops where a small number of trainees work on intricate bone and wood carvings over a two-year program.
The main attractions for us were the boiling mud pools and the Pohuto Geyser in the thermal valley. Both produced a strong smell of sulphur dioxide.
The thermal area in Rotorua extends right into the edge of town. Sulphur Point on the lake is an area of fumeroles and silica ledges. You can hear the water bubbling under the ground from the track along the edge of the lake.
The impressive Rotorua Museum is currently under wraps so I had to ‘borrow’ this image from Wikipedia to show how splendid this building will look look once restored. The museum has been closed since 2016 because of damage from the Kaikōura earthquake.
This half-timbered building that has been called ‘the most impressive Elizabethan Revival building in New Zealand’ and the most photographed building in the country.
A building with similar archtecture is the Rotorua i-SITE Visitor Information Centre, a prominent heritage building. It originally served as the Rotorua Post Office and was completed in June 1914.
