Lake, geothermal and hobbit fun from Rotorua, New Zealand

Stop number two for the New Zealand campervan road trip was Rotorua, which, shockingly, sits on Lake Rotorua! This is the second largest lake in New Zealand and is absolutely stunning. With it as our base for two nights, we enjoyed hobbit, lake, waterfall and geothermal fun.

Hobbits

Part of the draw for us for Rotorua was the fact that it’s only about an hour from the Hobbiton movie set. We did our tour here on our way from Hot Water Beach to Rotorua and it was SO GOOD! If you’re massive nerds and Lord of the Rings fans like us, you just have to go! It hammered down with rain for most of our tour, but even those rain clouds couldn’t dampen our spirits! (Hope some of you got that ha!) We had such fun quoting the movies and looking at the incredible detail around the hobbit holes. Other than Bag End and Sam’s hobbit hole, the honey one was my fave with bee keeping equipment outside and jars of honey outside the gate, and even in the hole’s windows! As part of the tour you get to go into the Green Dragon and enjoy a beer, although sadly it didn’t come in pints. I’ll stop now haha!

Lakes and waterfalls

Once in Rotorua we spent a lovely day enjoying the lake taking in its massive size and watching the lovely black swans that live there. We also visited nearby Blue Lake which was a lot smaller but so beautiful with forests all around. And ducklings!

There is a really lovely walk at the north end of Lake Rotorua which takes around an hour and you can take in the raging Okere Falls. This walk goes along part of the route that you’d do in Rotorua’s Grade Five rafting, which includes falling down a seven meter waterfall! Sadly, the water levels were too high for us to be able to do the grade five option. We thought about doing the grade 3-4 option as that was still available, but we decided to save our money as we have rafted before and there are so many things we haven’t done before in NZ.

Weird and wonderful geothermal fun

The Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland is just 45 minutes south of Rotorua so we went and did this on our way to Taupo. It was definitely one of the weirdest and coolest places I’ve ever been!

The valley is inside an active volcano and there are loads of steaming pools where hot gasses are escaping from under the ground. The 70 degree Champagne Pool (main pic) was epic with its bubbling water, clouds of steam and orange rim full of mineral deposits, including gold, silver, sulphur and arsenic. Not a good place for swimming ha! The bright green sulphur pool called Devil’s Bath was also fun to see and I really enjoyed watching the mud exploding up from the mud pool, it was weirdly satisfying to watch. The whole place stunk of egg because of the sulphur but it was so cool and like nothing I’d ever seen before!

We also got there in time for the 10.15am eruption of the Lady Knox Geyser. This involved a guy talking to us about the geometry of the area before pouring some natural soap into the geyser. Within a few minutes it was frothing and foaming and a few minutes later there was a loud rumbling and water and steam was ejected several metres up into the air. It was so fun! The eruption can last hours, sometimes days, depending how much water has built up underneath the geyser. We watched for about 10 mins before heading off to enjoy the rest of the park.