WAIRMEI’S WONDER VALLEY OF WFERNOES

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 614, 16 March 1929, Page 18

WAIRMEI’S WONDER VALLEY OF WFERNOES

, and then sometimes is sulky and rej fuses to show off satisfactorily, Wai- ! rakei never disappoints and one can j watch her with fascinated eyes workI ing herself up into passion. First a shuddering and seething ! activity in the pool, then a bubbling | fury, a lashing of her rocky basin j with great waves boiling in a whitened frenzy of rising water; then a flashing white whirlpool in the centre of the cauldron and up she goes—a glittering fountain of boiling spray, half wrapped in filmy scarves of steam, but breaking clear of these again and again to toss her wild, white dishevelled tresses in the air, hissing, roaring, ringed with rainbows, a mad. whirling Maenad, until abruptly, as if the dancer wearied, she sinks into her pool again for a brief period of quiescence. Other marvels are around us—the Champagne Pool, a circular cauldron for ever agitated with bursting bubbles and foam-bells and convulsive heatings, every now and then tormented into an explosion of snowy water and hissing steam; the Devil’s Ink-pot. a sinister black pool; little 1924 in the hillside, a cheerful, brisk little geyser which was born during the Taupo earthquake five years ago, hence its name; the Beauty Shop, a ring of hot mud lakelets white and cream and grey-blue, simmering and bubbling like fat in a frying-pan, the mud of which is reputed to cure all skin dis-

Written for THE HUN by ISABEL, M. CLVETT. KF ever tlie devil should feel in need of a holiday where he could enjoy the comforts of a “home away from home” as the advertisements say, he could hardly do better than take up residence for a time in Wairakei’s Geyser Valley. This truly weird and wonderful region is an inferno of heat and thermal activity sizzling, simmering boiling, bubbling—a veritable Hell’s Kitchen. The Valley of Wonders extends for about a mile between barren cliffs crowned with stunted scrub, and fissured here and there by steamvents and shallow pockets in which boil and bubble vicious miniature geysers. Down a rocky track we followed our Maori guide, a versatile fellow whose elaborate diction would have graced an Indian mission student, and who had a wealth of detailed description and legend to tell us in the cultured voice one often finds in the Maori.

The great Wairakei geyser, which plays regularly, is the show-piece of the valley. Wairakei does not give quite such a spectacular display as does Pohutu at his best, but there is one advantage about this. Whereas the temperamental Pohutu grumbles and growls and seethes unseen for some time before he can make up his mind to spring out of his rocky lair,

. eases and bestow a glorious complex- ; ion on the user; the Eagle’s Nest, a geyser cone built up of fallen sticks and branches, roughly laid to resemble a nest, and so encrusted with sparkling wdiite sinter as to look like interlacing branches laden with snow', and out of this miniature crater every few minutes rises a glistening little geyser in a snowy eruption; the Prince

Thermal Show Place That Would Make Satan Happy . . . Geysers, Boiling Pools and Awe-Inspiring Loveliness . . . Natural Cauldrons That Never Grow Cold . . .

of Wales’s Feathers, which can be manipulated by the guide so that by closing one vent and opening another two flashing, feathery jets of water filmy with steam, spring away front each other in graceful curves; the Dragon’s Mouth, a frightful, rocky gap like the jaggedly-opened jaws of a monster, in the red throat of which rumbles the imprisoned water fretting and fuming and belching forth hot sulphurous breaths. Then there is the Pool of the Dancing Stone. Queer things happen in this pool amid all the boiling and. bubbling and ceaseless commotion. There is heard the regular thud-splash-thud-splash of an old-fashioned paddle steamer churning its way up. stream, then passing on its way until the thud-splash-thud-splash grows fainter and fainter, and dies away. Of course there is no steamer —a small geyser under the rocky bank, known as the Paddle Wheei, causes what may be described as this auricular delusion.

Here the famous Twin Geyser functions; it had once two distinct iets, hut now is rather of the Siamese Twins variety, w-elded into one. At the bottom of this deep boiling cauldron which is for ever in restless motion is the Dancing Stone. This is quite a sizable boulder patched with hematite, green and bronze colouring, clearly seen through the clear creaming water, resting securely on the rocky floor. But if one cah believe one's eyes, as the agitation in the w ater increases to turbulence, as it does periodically, this solid rock lifts from its bed, once, twice, thrice as lightly as a rubber ball, and then with a rush and a roar the seething pool flings itself into the air in flashing explosions of spray anil steam so mingled that it is difficult to distinguish actual water from vapour.

Lovely things as well as grim ones are in this valley. There are the three B’airy Pools, clear and tranquil, just gently steaming, turquoisecoloured, paler blue and milky white, one of soda, one of salt, and one of alum. Then there is the boiling waterfall, which is at nature’s patient mysterious work of forming new terraces. This waterfall is fed by a geyser high up on the cliff which, erupting from time to time in silvery fountains, pours down the terraced slope in clear steaming cascades, encrusting the rocks in its path with gold and coral-coloured deposits.

Wairoa Valley, or the Rainbow Mile, is like a palette on which nature, -the great artist, has lavishly splashed her colours, so many and varied are the hues of the hot pools and mudpots which chequer the valley. Here is a clear steaming pool of heavenly blue side by side with one of pale sea-green. Here is a deep, sullenlooking, claret-coloured pond, not clear but thick and turbid, yet the water when taken from the pool is colourless, the hematite rocks in the basin giving the water its sinister hue.

The Golden Waterfall is so called because its clear waters cascade over a steep little drop of rock encrusted with yellow silica deposits. The boiling stream which dashes down the valley, over its salmon-pink, green and sulphur-coloured mud and rocks supplies the baths at the Geyser Hotel, a mile or two away, where tlie water is still comfortably hot and steamy for bathers.

Until a year or two ago the banks of this strange river were overhung by clustering ferns, delicately green and fresh, but there came a day when fire swept over them, and the Geyser Valley also, in a destructive whirlwind of smoke and flame, leaving all its green loveliness shrivelled and dead. Now the sides of the valley are blackened and bare, giving an air of added desolation to this weird region, but in those three days and nights of leaping flame and inky shadows and rolling smoke-clouds while !he fire raged, these valleys were infernos indeed, with the roar and crackle of lurid flames, the blazing fragments of scrub flung abroad on the wind, the towering columns of black smoke shot through with steaming sparks, and always the white steam-wraiths rising, the explosive geysers hurling their silvery fountains aloft, the grumbling roar and mutter of imprisoned water boiling up for release and falling back upon the super-heated rocks with a hideous uproar of hisi> ing clouds of steam. Dante could scarcely have imagined the internal pit with more realistic and lurid detail than Geyser Valley displayed.

To me, however, the most tremendous and impressive spectacle of this savage region is the Fumarole, or Blowhole of Karapiti. Night and day, for ever and ever out of an opening nine inches across, arises this infernal blast of steam in a tall, billowing. snow-white cloud which can be seen for miles on a clear day.

Sir James Hector has declared that this vent is the safety-valve for the North Island. We visited the weird place by night, a desolate and unlovely region of stunted scrub, and long before we reached the Blowhole we could hear its deep, roaring breath and the frenzied boiling of the water in its cauldron, which apparent*) never reaches the surface.

The tall, snowy column of vapour towering up into the velvety darkne?= of the summer night swayed spectrally in the light breeze, and its sultry breath, which sounded rather like the snoring and blustering of » sea-wind in the crannies and crags o'. a cliff, beat upon our faces with * dry heat quite unlike steam-heat, and to demonstrate this peculiarity of the super-heated steam blazing sacks were thrust into its midst and the sparks and smoke rolled up with the column in glowing streamers. To prove the extraordinary force P° E sessed by the rising steam the guide flung empty benzine tins into the column. They were caught in the immense draught and tossed into the air as lightly as if they had been ping-pong balls, or were hurled aside with a crash and clatter.