"I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think--' (she was rather glad there WAS no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) '--but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you, know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?”
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Taupo feels like a very grown up, civilised sort of wonderland, huddled as it is around the shores of a huge and reflective lake, framed by distant mountains and with, at least for the duration we were there, perpetual blue skies and sunshine.
"It's the sort of place," comments Helen, "that you might go on holiday to."
I admit that we are, technically, on holiday in Taupo now, but I know what she means. It's the sort of place you could retreat to for a week in which you would comment on the beautiful views while drinking tea in china tea cups with your little finger extended.
Of course we are at the 'scum' end of this spectrum and so we are staying in a free camping spot a little out of town beside a river, endowed with some of the smelliest hole in the ground toilets that I have ever, in my extensive toilet studies throughout New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia and South East Asia, come across. Unfortunately it's also the first time I have introduced Michael and Helen to the beauty of camping 'free'. They are not picky people, perfectly able to deal with mess, and admiring of the river and the peaceable atmosphere. But Michael returns from his first sojourn to the toilet pale and quivering. He doesn't quite get over it for some half an hour. He's a strong Yorkshire man with black belts in various martial arts, but I think he met his nemesis in that toilet. He's so disgusted he decides, for the first time in the trip, to 'set up' the toilet he and Helen have in their van.
This works out rather well for the rest of us. Michael is not the only one. I pride myself on using any kind of toilet without fuss or prudery, but I use the one in their ban on at least one occasion. It feels a little weird though, like pooing in their cupboard, and we eventually work out that the toilets get cleaned in the morning and only smell really bad at night so try yo time our bodily functions accordingly. M, having his trademark iron self control, manages to accomplish this but my toiletry habits just don't really work like that. So I just become adept at holding my breath. It's all worth it for the sake of enjoying the company of ducks and the absence of A4 sheets of paper stuck up everywhere with blu tack proclaiming various rules and regulations from the necessity to clean barbecue facilities after use, to the necessity for absolute silence after ten, to the endorsement to please wash your hands after weeing. As I have noted before, the less facilities a site provided, the more fun it was. It is amazing how many necessities turn out to not actually be especially necessary.
The first thing we do is go out on a horse trek. Helen, as a horse aficionado (if that is an expression) is very happy and natural leaping onto her steed, for all the world as if she had won countless rosettes in countless gymkhanas. (Which indeed she has.) In fact we are all very happy and comfortable with the horses, though certainly rather less good at it.
"Is anybody afraid of horses?" Asks the stable manager as we pay our way in. I say no, and am, for once, not even lying. In fact I love the horses, the feeling of riding them - and the landscape. We trek through stunning and lush scenery and around the 'Cratets if the Moon', a site with some crazy volcanic pits full of bright chemicals, hissing steam and the smell of sulphur. We will visit them for a closer look later, on foot.
Recognising how happy I feel, (and indeed have always felt, having been on similar treks before), on horseback I toy with the best deal of adding 'learn to ride' to my extensive list of things I would like to augment my life with when I get back. But learning to ride is difficult and expensive and I conclude that the things I love about it would be better fulfilled by going on a similar trek once a month. I like the connectedness with nature and with the animals but prefer not to have to tell the horse what to do. It would ignore me anyway. Convincing authority is not my strong point.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”"
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
"You see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
...which two quotes together rather sum up this trip. We go to see the Craters of the Moon a d the beautiful, clear white foaming Huka Falls. We gaze quietly at the water, beautiful but deadly, and then head to the Craters. We walk around the steaming landscape, peering into deep holes in the earth coloured vividly in spikey red, yellow or orange, are enveloped in thick white steam emanating from hissing geysers, and gaze down into spitting, bubbling pools of viscous liquid or mud, breathing in a distinctive and insistent smell of sulphur.
The pits and pools have names like 'The Devil's Ink Pot" and "The Devil's Bath". I can see why. Looking down into them it seems to me that some other worldy creature must live here. Perhaps it does. We just can't see it. Like Alice, this trip has shown me so many crazy things I am pretty much ready to believe anything is possible.
We end the day in the Taupo Polynesian hot springs, which are beautiful, natural and isolated in a way none of the other hot pools, however lovely, have managed to achieve. The pools are formed in natural terraces, of different temperatures depending on their distance from the volcanic source. The water is a clear white. It's stunning. There is really nothing more I can say to describe it other than that it feels like falling into a brightly coloured glossy catalogue and temporarily dwelling inside one of its fanciest pages.
"The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed to Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the other: the only difficulty was, that her flamingo was gone.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
We get up the following day, and, like all self respecting English adventurers, we begin by playing crazy golf. Lake and mountains glittering in the sun behind us, we do not stop until someone has been well and truly beaten and someone else has well and truly won. I think. Over the course of the game I think winning became rather less important than keeping some sort of track of whose turn it was, which entailed a large amount of giggling and which I don't think we ever actually mastered.
By the time we are finished and moving on towards Tongariro, I am not sure we are going to be considered old or mature enough to climb a mountain in two days time, and rather expect us to be turned away at the start.
"“Have i gone mad?"
"I'm afraid so, but let me tell you something, the very best people usually are.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
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