Baths, babies, bikes and brothers in Rotorua
By Vanessa Scott
The jetty at the end of the garden is a prime spot for spotting black swans
It's also the chosen boardwalk for the one-year-old and her Peter Rabbit
On Sunday morning it's off to Polynesian Spa's coolest pool for a post-breakfast paddle
Hillview Lodge, Lake Rotoiti
When family duty calls, it’s time to load up the car and spend a weekend lounging by a lake
I’ve never been a very good tourist, but I have a steaming sulphuric soft spot for Rotorua. There’s something appealing about the kitschy Maori souvenir retro-ness of the place, but also mostly the fact that the earth’s crust is very thin there. Burping mud and sci-fi-ish steaming lakes are always fascinating because they’re a reminder that we’re all just skating around on the skin of a planet which contains a core hotter than 3000 degrees celsius.
Unlike other touristy towns there are no historical ruins that require feats of imagination to bring them to life or contrived manmade attractions; just good old-fashioned colliding tectonic plates.
A weekend in Rotorua was also ostensibly a tour of duty to see my dear brother take part in the annual Bike the Lake challenge, so two good excuses to pack up the baby and take the whole family down.
It’s lucky there was the promise of hot pools, because travelling with a small child is not a holiday but more a mandate to fill the car with toddler essentials, and spend every waking minute watching her in a beautiful setting which only reminds you of what it used to be like when you had actual holidays and an actual life.
Nevertheless we survived the drive down without too much spilt milk and after stopping for directions at the local shop I simply read the large tattoo on the neck of the girl in front of me which helpfully read ‘ROTOITI’. We must be in the right place then.
Rather than languishing separately in motels we decided to split the bill on a bigger bach that would sleep eight of us and would work out more cheaply per night.
A good decision because the house was perfect, or as my little niece said, ‘It’s a really, cool, flash house that’s like a mansion to me." Big deck, lots of bedrooms, a kitchen with a four-slice toaster (!), comfortable couches and beds. Outside the garden gently merged with the lake and featured a lone jetty that could be a setting for a televised heart to heart. I’m so used to beach settings for holidays that I’ve never considered the different quality of a lakeside view. It’s not salty, loud and thrashing like the sea, but more introspective, eerily still, vaguely threatening. (Possibly because it is also the perfect place for a one-year-old to drown herself so enjoyment of the view was coupled with hyper-vigilance.)
On Saturday we left the baby with Nana and managed to turn into proper tourists for a few hours. That meant heading to Hell's Gate thermal spa after being intrigued by the brochure cover, which had what appeared to be two females playfully painting each other in thick mud. On closer inspection one of them was actually a long-haired dude but by that stage we were already sold. We happily haemorrhaged $115 each for a package walk through a geothermal valley, and a private 20-minute mud bath followed by extended lounging in a sulphur pool.
Like rookies we forgot the camera, instantly blackened our silver jewellery in the mineral water, and politely said nothing when the advertised mud bath turned out to be a shallow grey soup. Okay, there was technically ‘mud’ in the bath but it had to scraped carefully from the bottom in small handfuls. We spent most of our private 20 minutes excavating the stuff as if it were gold and refusing to share it. Not like the brochure but still fun. Plus the smell of gunpowder marinating on the skin and the tranquiliser effect of a long hot bath was definitely restorative.
Sunday morning we were cheerleaders for my cyclist brother. A simple duty which involved waving him off, heading for a long lazy breakfast in town, and then waddling back to the finish line to wave him back in. Job done. After breakfast had settled, we took baby to the Polynesian Pools and plopped her in the coolest pool we could find – still toasty at 33 degrees Celsius but she loved it and we enjoyed a splash around. The lifeguard claimed we were lucky to have kicking room as it was common for several busloads of tourists to arrive at once and proceed to test Archimedes’ principle to its absolute limit.
Back at the house the rest of the weekend passed pleasantly and quickly in a blur of ice cream, stolen naps in the bedroom upstairs, plaiting little niece’s hair, listening to the impossibly plump bumblebees camped in a bush outside, afternoon beer, and mostly just dawdling after the baby as she happily explored, repeatedly emptying the dominoes box and eating cheese off the ground.
All told, a good way to enjoy Rotorua without feeling too much like a tourist. Have never been that good at it anyway...
