"An Around-the-World-Ticket for Two, Please."

Hell's Gate!

Posted by Sarah O'Neill , Sunday, 8 May 2011 16:43

We got up on Saturday and drove back towards where we came from the day before, but a bit more northerly, to Rotorua. You can smell Rotorua before you see it! It is a very activer geothermal area, and the smell of sulpher (or rotten eggs!) fills the air! It takes some getting used to! We got there just in time for lunch, and Ben spied the Golden Arches! I made a deal with him that if her had no more fast food in the south island (for last two weeks) he could have a Big Mac in the north island, so he decided to cash in his Big Mac. They had a special deal called a 'Mac Attack' which Ben took full advantage of as it was two Big Macs with chips and a coke!!! What a cheek! We then headed to the information centre to book the white water rafting which is a speciality here in Rotorua, as well as a Maori culture evening, and a visit to the mud baths at Hell's Gate! Sadly we couldn't book the white water rafting for Sunday as the river was closed to rafting due to the large amounts of rain, and it was too dangerous! So, we booked our Maori night for Sunday, and our Mud Bath for the evening! The lady was really helpful and told us 4pm was a good time to go, as there is an hours walk around the geothermal area, finished up with a mud bath and then a dip in the sulpher pool! So we found the campsite and booked in, 3 nights for the price of 2 which was fab, and then headed to Hell's Gate! The walk takes you around a landscape that looks like that of another planet! Water bubbles at the surface, steam rising all around, the stink of eggs in the air, and boiling mud! It is very strange! George Bernard Shaw named the area Hell's Gate as he thought it was the closest thing to Hell on earth. We also saw a mud volcano, standing 2 metres tall, with with boiling spurting mud at the top, which was pretty cool! We also saw the only hot waterfall in the southern hemisphere which we would have loved to shower under, but you're not allowed! We finished the walk and headed to have our mud bath. We were told to take any jewellery off and change etc, then taken to a rectangular bath filled with muddy grey looking water. The mud is very very fine, so it's watery and there's lots of thick gloopy mud at the bottom! So we set about covering ourselves in the thick gloopy mud from the bottom which was fun! It was just like those mud face packs I have used before! We were allowed to put it on up to our cheek bones, but Ben didn't listen properly and covered his head, ending up looking like Mr T! He washed it off too quickly to take a photo! We had twenty minutes in the mud bath which was lovely and warm, we exfoliated well and enjoyed the experience! Half way through Ben told me I had my earrings on, which was rather silly as I had thought to myself that I definitely had no jewellery on earlier, and they were turning black!!! Oh well, they have a new look now! We had to have a cold shower to rinse off the mud and then we could go in the sulpher pool for as long as we liked. It was lovely and warm, just very stinky!! We enjoyed a good half hour before getting out and showering, trying our best to get the stink off us! We wondered if our swimmers would ever be the same again, they were particularly grey looking! However our skin was extremely soft and lovely which was nice! I put our cossies straight in the washing machine when we got back, but they still had a distinct eggy smell to them!