It was a good measuring stick for me to use to see how I would handle myself in an emergency. One, we didn't check the door before going out (see if it was warm, etc...). Two, I didn't take the keys, so if we needed to get out of the area in a hurry, the car was not an option for us. Three, we didn't take our passports, so we could have lost those. Four, we were among the last ones out of the hotel, though we weren't that much slower, I think.
We had to wait around with everybody else outside next to the cars until the firemen came. Meanwhile, the hotel staff had to check lists and bang on rooms and make sure no one else was in the hotel. The firefighters were pretty fast. They seemed faster than the ones on Stanford -- and I imagine they were coming from further away. Patricia opined that firefighters in New Zealand are just as hot as in the US.
After the firefighters gave the all clear (also fairly quickly), they let us back up, with apologies. It turns out someone had left the door closed in the laundry room while drying clothes and it set something off. As we got back to our room, we noticed that our door was open (along with everybody else's). I had particularly remembered to close the door on our way out (guess I was more concerned with robbery than safety) -- I had definitely not left the door propped open with the wastebasket. Whether it was to allow the firefighters easy access in case they needed it, or a service in case the guests had forgotten their keys, I don't know, but I wasn't so happy about our belongings not behind a locked door. Oh well.
The next day, we checked out and said goodbye to StinkyTown. We drove down a little ways to go to the Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland in order to catch the daily geyser eruption. We got there a little early, and got tickets for entry into Wai-O-Tapu and also the geyser (which is a little ways off, outside the park). I suppose it might have been walkable to the geyser if you had plenty of time to spare...it made me glad once again that we had the car. Since it was still a little bit of time before the geyser was scheduled to go off, we decided to head past the geysers a little bit where there were some mud pools (free to see).
The mud pool was big, with various places bubbling with different speeds, viscosity, etc... Sometimes one bubbling site or another would erupt with a fairly large expulsion (at least human height). Patricia said that one erupted a good amount and actually splattered a little onto her jacket. She also showed me how smooth the mud was against skin when another one splattered a little bit onto the railing. That's probably when she decided to buy some of the mud to see how her skin would handle it. I was fine with that...I get to make fun of her by saying she went all the way to New Zealand to buy mud.
We drove back to the geyser where a ranger was checking tickets. There was some amphitheater-type wooden bench seating around the geyser, so we sat down and waited since we were still a little early. As it got more crowded, we moved over a little more to get a better view. The crowding was more than I expected, so we decided to try to leave early if possible to beat the rush. I was pretty sure most people would go straight to the Thermal Wonderland afterwards.
I always had this memory that I went to see Old Faithful with my family (at least, I remember my dad being very close by). But when we got back from the trip, my parents confirmed my nagging suspicion that we had never been to Yellowstone. So whether I imagined/dreamed it all, or saw it on a TV program, or got Old Faithful confused with some other geyser in California, I don't know. But anyways, my memory is that the geyser I've seen before shot out really tall, like 100 feet maybe. So I was expecting this geyser to not quite match up to that, and I was right. While we were waiting, Patricia and I conjectured a little bit about why the geyser erupts at the same time every day. I figured that it was extremely unlikely that any geyser could align so perfectly with a 24-hour cycle, so the odds were against it being natural. I figured there was a little pipe that led down to the geyser (at an angle, so it doesn't come out the cone of the geyser), and at the appropriate time, they would dump something into the geyser to stimulate it to erupt.
It turns out, the ranger actually acknowledged that the geyser eruption is unpredictable, so they help it along by dumping something into the geyser (it was some powder of some sort, I think. I forgot what it was, the ranger explained it all). And the ranger proceeded to dump a small bag of it into the geyser cone itself. No attempt at subterfuge at all. I guess I was expecting the geyser to just go off by itself, not have a little presentation by a ranger as well, hence the need for remotely setting off the geyser and my elaborate pipe and everything. Now that I think about it, maybe the ranger dumped in detergent or something. It needed to reduce the surface tension of the upper chamber of water so that the pressurized water underneath would come out or something. Anyways, the geyser frothed a bit while the ranger continued his speech, and then finally the geyser erupted. And it was about what I expected...not extravagant...just there.
[Note: Wikipedia says there is another geyser called Old Faithful in Calistoga, California, so maybe that was it.]
We took off while other people were taking shots of themselves with the geyser in the background and so forth, and made it back to the main Wai-O-Tapu center without getting snarled in a traffic jam. Wai-O-Tapu itself was interesting. Patricia was dreading another Craters of the Moon, but it turned out to be worth the visit, I think. Things were definitely colorful. After all the thermal places that we went to, I finally got up the courage to touch a couple small pools as we passed them. The first one was sort of bubbly and normal luke-warm. The second one probably would have burned me if I kept my finger in a little longer. So some of them can get pretty hot. As we headed out, I'm pretty sure Patricia picked up the jar of mud. Heehee...
My GPS was having super problems charting a route back to Auckland, for some strange reason. So I had it instead route to Highway 1 somewhere a bit south of the Auckland airport. And since I still didn't trust it, I had Patricia use the directions that I had printed out beforehand from Google Maps. Before we headed back, I kept joking that we should just continue south a little bit more and we'd end up back at the Honey Hive for more honey-flavored ice cream...yumm.... But instead, we went back north, passing through StinkyTown again. In fact, since it was lunchtime, we just decided to stop at downtown StinkyTown one last time for food. We went into a nice Japanese restaurant.
For some reason, there was some confusion with the directions while Patricia was giving them to me, so I ended up heading backwards (east) on 29 for a while before getting back on track. So we lost a little time there. The drive was pretty uneventful, except for a portion where we were heading west on 2, and the sun was shining through the clouds, which made these brilliant shafts of light. At a certain point on highway 1, my GPS was no longer getting super confused so I let it guide us the rest of the way to the hotel. The highway kept getting bigger and more congested as we got to Auckland. The Spellbound guide at Waitomo was totally correct when he said that Auckland is just sprawl. A big contrast to the little towns in the rest of New Zealand...Auckland is more like the Bay Area in the amount that it sprawls out all over. At one point, I was following a cute little green eco car since it was making good time through the traffic. And then the next thing I knew I had followed it all the way onto an offramp. So I had to figure out how to get back on track.
The GPS was a lifesaver for me while we were driving around. I can't remember how many times I missed the turn or went the wrong way, and having the GPS tell me how to get to my destination from where I currently was as soon as I made a wrong turn was invaluable.
We decided to not do much when we got to the hotel. It was a pretty nice hotel, but there was no parking. So instead of dealing with parking when I was exhausted from the drive, we let the valet deal with it for the night. I told them to just put it on the room bill, and he said he would. So we got to our room and didn't go out for the rest of the day. I spent the time reorganizing my luggage for the Auckland stay -- I put my passport into the safe, but the safe was smaller than the one in Sydney, so I couldn't put the passport in my locked backpack and then into the safe. Instead, I put the passport under the foam padding at the bottom of the safe so that it wouldn't be obvious that it was there.
I'm always super suspicious of the safes ever since I locked my belongings into a hotel safe in China, and they sent somebody up to help me out. Well, the person just typed in some override code into the safe and then it opened up, presto! Basically, that means there are a lot of people in the hotel (and ex-employees) who can just open all the safes. Blargh.
We also went downstairs to have dinner at the hotel restaurant. I thought the hotel had a nice view, but it was just a view of a small harbor...you couldn't really look out into the ocean or anything. And besides, in the restaurant, it was so dark outside and so bright inside that all you could really see is just your reflection.
We spent the rest of the night doing laundry in the awesomely large tub in our room. Patricia wanted to use the laundry facilities at StinkyTown, but I didn't want to, because the machines looked dirty/rusty, and I was also afraid that all our clothes would come out smelling like StinkyTown. Luckily, there was a hair dryer we could use to speed up the drying, so we didn't have to hang our underwear outside the window for all to see... We'd just do without room service for a couple days while our clothes dried.
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