Honeymoon 8: Volcano flight

So today we took a light aircraft flight (I forget exactly which model of Cesna) over about four volcanoes. The first three were extinct, though of those the largest had a crater that was 25km long, and went from mountain top, to under a lake to still slightly active as it rose from the ground at the other side of the lake. The last one White Island is still active and erupts around every 2 to 3 years. The rest of the time is slowly bubbles sulphuric acid down the island and into the ocean. It's odd to think that they used to mine sulphur from it; though unsurprisingly that ended when the workers were tragically killed in an eruption with the exception of their cat the only survivor dubbed Peter the Great by the rescue team. Considering the island was originally bought off the local Maori tribe for two barrels of rum, I'm not sure the buyers got the good end of the deal. It was an absolutely fantastic experience, really good that Rachael had come across it in a newspaper article.

From there we drove down back past Rotorua to Taupo on the Lake Taupo, and had a tasty lunch and enjoyed the view, including a snow capped Mount Doom in the distance.

After that we had a long drive to Napier going through a lot of their logging country. Between the very long straight roads, and the endless expanses of pine trees on both sides, that then snaked up into mountains it looked like somewhere out of the US or Canada, certainly very different to the landscape we were driving down before.

Tomorrow swimming with sharks in the shark tank. Super excited for that!