Four days in Rotorua: a town built on something that is still cooking

Spend the first afternoon in town understanding what you are standing on. Kuirau Park is a public park at the western edge of the centre with boiling mud pools, steaming vents and a hot lake in it, all fenced but not hidden, and it is free. Two concrete basins near the centre of it take thermal water knee deep with benches around the edge, and sitting there while the ground hisses behind you is a good introduction to the town's relationship with what is underneath it.

The lake is a two minute walk further on. Lake Rotorua fills part of the caldera, it is shallow and grey green, and there are steaming patches in the shallows along the shore.

Then book yourself into the hot pools at the edge of it for the end of the day. There are twenty six mineral pools there in four sections, fed by two different springs: an alkaline one that comes out at between thirty six and forty two degrees and is good for a long soak, and a much more acidic one from a spring the locals call the Priest, after a Catholic missionary who claimed it cured his arthritis in 1878. Several of the pools look straight out over the water.

Go at dusk. The steam comes off the surface, the lake goes flat and the light is worth the timing.

The Whakarewarewa geothermal valley is three kilometres south of the centre and it is divided between two Māori operations that sit side by side, run by different hapū, showing broadly the same ground in completely different ways. Doing both in one day is the point.

Te Puia is the larger and more polished. It holds the geyser terrace, where Pōhutu, the biggest active geyser in the southern hemisphere, throws water thirty metres up and does it repeatedly through the day, along with mud pools, a national carving and weaving school that trains Māori artists, and a kiwi house. The guided tours are given by people from the valley.

Next door, the thermal village is a place where about twenty families still live on top of the field. They cook in steam boxes and boiling pools in their gardens, they bathe in the springs, and the tour is led by residents through the streets they live in. It is less produced than its neighbour and rather more affecting, and the corn cooked in a hot pool is genuinely good.

In the late afternoon, take the gondola up the hill on the far side of town. The view runs across the whole caldera and there is a luge track down through the trees that is the least dignified fun available in the North Island.

On the tenth of June 1886, Mount Tarawera split open along a seventeen kilometre rift and buried the country south east of Rotorua under ash and mud. It killed about 153 people, destroyed the Pink and White Terraces, which had been the most famous natural attraction in the southern hemisphere, and rearranged the landscape. Everything today is on that ground.

Start with Waimangu, twenty minutes south, which is the only geothermal system in the world with an exact birthday. The rift ran straight through the valley, and what has grown back since is a hot, steaming, self-contained ecosystem being watched by scientists as it develops. You walk down through it for about four kilometres, past a pale blue crater lake and the biggest hot spring on the planet, and a shuttle brings you back up.

Then Wai-O-Tapu, another fifteen minutes on, which is the loudest of the geothermal parks: a bright green and orange spring called the Champagne Pool, sulphur terraces in colours that look adjusted, and collapsed craters. There is a geyser at the entrance that erupts once every morning at a quarter past ten, reliably, because a ranger drops surfactant into it, which is either a disappointment or a good story depending on your temperament.

Finish at the buried village on the way back. Te Wairoa was the staging point for the terraces before the eruption, and a night of mud put two metres over the top of it. Part has since been dug out: floors, a mill, a whare with its roof caved in, and a waterfall walk behind.

The last morning goes north, which is the direction you are probably driving anyway.

The farm show at Ngongotahā is unashamedly a tourist institution and it has been running for decades: nineteen breeds of ram on a stage, shearing, a dog working sheep, cow milking and lambs to feed. It sounds absurd and it is very good at what it does, and if you have children it will be the thing they talk about.

In the same place is the national kiwi hatchery, which is a serious conservation operation rather than an attraction. Eggs are taken from the wild, incubated and hatched here, and the chicks are raised until they are big enough to survive a stoat. Between September and March you can see eggs hatching. About sixty per cent of the kiwi chicks hatched in captivity in New Zealand come through this building.

From there it is three hours to Auckland, or ninety minutes west to the limestone caves if you want to break the drive.