Susan's visit - Taupo

The lads in our favourite Taupo house were good enough to have all three of us to stay for the night, so we set ourselves up on the spare bed and floor space! On Friday morning we got up early to get out to Aratiatia Dam in time to see a release. Making sure we were early, we waited patiently until after the scheduled time before finding a sign saying that because of the reduced levels of the lake they were only doing a couple of releases each day. There have been strict warnings in place to use as little energy as possible as all the power generating lakes in the country are very low at the moment after the drought during the summer.



As we now had two hours to wait until the next release we went upstream to Huka Falls. Susan was very impressed and instructed us never to paddle it. Admittedly it was quite high that day and there’s no way we’d dream of paddling it at that level. From there we went to the Honey Hive only to find that it was shut for winter – things weren’t quite going according to plan! We had a quick look at the Prawn Farm and convinced Susan that she didn’t really want to go fishing for prawns in ponds! We then drove over to the Craters of the Moon and the Wairakei Terraces to show Susan all the steam that is naturally coming out of the earth in that area. At Wairakei Terraces there is a major power generating operation harnessing the energy in the steam. Later on that day we returned to Aratiatia and got to see the release. Here’s a couple of before and after pictures for you, taken about 10 minutes apart. It’s pretty impressive to see how quickly the river can go from a trickle to a big fast river. Don’t worry – we won’t be paddling that one!


That afternoon we hit the road again, this time heading to Hawkes Bay and along the way we stopped at the Bridge over the Mohaka.