Woke up quite early, despite the evening/nightly Pete’s visit. Quickly made custard for a breakfast and moved a few meters to White Island Tours, who are the only company doing boat trips to White Island
. This island is the only active marine volcano in New Zealand but maybe in feature there will be more of them – just the day before scientists monitored unusual seismic activity around New Zealand and it looks like another volcano islands are on the way. The island is also owned by some trust and you can get there just on guided tour and there are four companies, which are allowed to take you there – 3 of them with helicopter.
I was really surprised how the White Island Tour care about environment – they had a special brochure about them on the boat and they recycle, trying to consume as little of fuel as possible, have special wrapping for their lunches, which are more nature friendly than the normal one and so on – a long list of things.
The trip there took about an hour and we finally got on the island itself. It smells of sulphur, which was mined there, has wonderful colors, with yellow as main one, a lot of steam everywhere and it doesn’t have normal lava but some „lava“ bomb which it throw all over, which mean that in case of some volcanic activity you have to hide behind some wall or heap.
There is the main crater with lake inside, but it is really hard to see it because of all the steam all around.
We also tasted the streams here or sulphur rock – it is a bit salty and has about the same acidity as juices in our stomach.
It took us about 2 hours to get back to the starting point, where is the last attraction – old mining building with some equipment still in it – interesting is that rubber lasts longer than iron.
On the way back we found a lot of dolphins, they were all around boat, swimming under it, surfing and jumping – usually when we weren’t prepared with our cameras.
When we got back we just jumped into car and quickly moved to Kaituna, to do it again. Some local guys joined us and Vlada and Tomas were quite surprise, when they found they had to lead the group and that these guys never jumped the last waterfall. They also had to rescue them under it 🙂
Another quick move to Whakapapa, where is the pick up location for Tongariro Crossing. We booked our bus on the way there, which means we’ll get up early tomorrow as well.