Waimangu Volcanic Valley

Why it matters

Geothermal systems are normally beyond dating. They were here before anyone was, they will outlast the roads laid over them, and the best a sign can offer is thousands of years. Waimangu has a birthday, and its owners will give it to you to the half hour: 5.30am on 10 June 1886, the moment the Tarawera eruption ended. The rift that opened that night ran north-east through the mountain and south-west through Lake Rotomahana, and it kept going — straight through this valley, which until the previous evening had been bush, farmland and the track to the Pink and White Terraces. By dawn everything living in it was dead and the ground had been rearranged.

That single fact is what makes the place scientifically unusual rather than merely handsome. Because the starting gun is known, everything since can be measured against it. Waimangu describes itself as the only geothermal system in the world created within written history, and the only one in New Zealand never altered by human activity — no bores, no diversions, no drainage. The bush you walk down through is not old growth. It is a hundred and forty years of unsupervised recovery, and it is being counted.

The valley then produced something that has since vanished again. From 1900 a geyser played here that was the largest known in the world at the time, throwing a column of dark, mud-laden water high enough to be watched from the ridge — and it is the reason for the name. Waimangu is black water.

It also killed four people. On 30 August 1903 it erupted without warning while a party stood near it, and the guide Joseph Warbrick — a rugby international who had captained the 1888–89 New Zealand Native team — died instantly along with three tourists. In November 1904 the geyser stopped, as abruptly and inexplicably as it had started, and it has never played since. One of the silica terraces on the walk carries the Warbrick name.

What it's like

The first thing that marks Waimangu out from the other thermal parks is the shape of the visit. You do not walk a loop. You walk down a valley — a long, gentle, mostly downhill descent from the visitor centre at the top to the shore of Lake Rotomahana at the bottom, and a bus brings you back up. That one decision changes the whole feel of it. There is no point at which you turn and retrace; the valley simply keeps unfolding downhill, and the features arrive one after another rather than arranged around a circuit.

What arrives is unusually varied. Frying Pan Lake, which Waimangu describes as the largest hot spring in the world by surface area, is not a pool so much as a steaming acre of water lying in the floor of a crater, venting continuously along its edges. Inferno Crater sits above the path up a flight of steps, and is a blue that photographs badly and stops people talking. Between them are sinter terraces still growing, stalactites forming under overhangs, hot streams running beside the track, and — because none of this is landscaped — regenerating bush pressing in on all of it, loud with birds. It is markedly quieter than the parks nearer the city, and the quiet is a large part of what you are buying.

How to visit

The walk is sold in sections, and this is the part worth understanding before you arrive. The track runs from the visitor centre to the lake with three bus stops along it, and the shuttle is included, so you can stop wherever your legs or your interest run out and ride back from there. To Bus Stop 1 is 1.5km, about an hour, and covers most of the headline features — the Southern Crater, Frying Pan Lake, Cathedral Rocks and the steps up to Inferno Crater. To Bus Stop 2 is 3.2km, about an hour and a half, with steps down after the first stop and good birdlife. All the way to the lake is 4km, about an hour and three quarters, and flat from the second stop. Adding the Mt Haszard hiking trail makes it 4.5km and about two hours, climbing from Inferno Crater for a view over the valley, Maunga Kākaramea and Mount Tarawera; it needs real shoes and is no use with a pushchair.

Getting there. Drive south from Rotorua on State Highway 5 for about fourteen kilometres, turn onto Waimangu Road and follow it six kilometres to the car park — roughly twenty-five minutes from town, and about fifty from Taupō. Without a car, there is a shuttle from outside the Rotorua i-SITE at 9am daily, back in the city by 1.30pm, and it must be booked ahead on 07 348 5179. Note the catch: at least two adults must be booked for it to run at all, so a solo traveller cannot rely on it.

Hours and last entry. Open daily 8.30am to 5pm, but last entry for the walk is 3pm and last entry for the boat is 1.30pm — arrive at two intending to do the full experience and you will be doing the walk instead. The booking time you choose is your arrival time at reception, not your departure on the water.

Making the most of it

Walk down and ride up, and do not be talked out of it. The gradient is the whole design of the place. People who decide to walk back up arrive at the car park hot, late and having seen the same thing twice; the shuttle is included in every ticket and stops at all three points on the track.

Do not build the day around seeing Inferno Crater full. The crater rises and falls on a cycle linked, inversely and still unexplained, to the discharge of Frying Pan Lake — when one goes up the other goes down. It is often quoted as a tidy thirty-eight days, and the underlying measurement is a good deal less tidy than that: a mean of 37.7 days give or take 9.7, and gaps between overflows recorded anywhere from two days to a hundred and eighty-eight. Whatever the water is doing on your morning is what you get, and it is worth seeing either way.

Take the Mt Haszard trail if your knees are willing. It is the only part of the visit that is properly uphill and it is the only place you get the valley as a shape rather than a sequence — and on a clear day it puts Tarawera on the skyline, which is the thing that made all of this.

If you pay rates in New Zealand, ask. Waimangu offers a local rate that is not published on the website; you telephone reception on 07 366 6137 and bring proof, such as a rates bill.

Take water, and a picnic if you like. There is a licensed café at the top and picnic areas down the valley; own food is welcome there but not in the café, and own alcohol not at all. Toilets are at the visitor centre and all three bus stops, and there are none on the boat.

On access, Waimangu is honest rather than reassuring, which is more useful. Staff meet wheelchair users on arrival and will get you onto the flat sections of track. But Inferno Crater and the Mt Haszard trail are not wheelchair-accessible, the shuttles have no lifts, motorised chairs and scooters cannot be carried, and boarding the boat means steps and an open gap above the water. They ask that a wheelchair user is accompanied throughout. Ring ahead.

Nearby

Waimangu sits in the middle of a short run of State Highway 5 that has more going on underground than almost anywhere else in the country. Maunga Kākaramea, which most signs and most guidebooks still call Rainbow Mountain, is a few minutes further south — twenty-six kilometres from Rotorua, with the car park just past the Murupara turnoff. The crater lake walk there is thirty minutes return, graded easiest, and costs nothing, which makes it the cheapest geothermal half hour in the district. Wai-O-Tapu is on the same stretch of road again, ten minutes on.

Mount Tarawera itself is the other half of this story and stands over the valley from the north-east; the rift that made Waimangu is the same rift that tore the mountain open. The Buried Village of Te Wairoa, on the far side of that rift, is where the same five hours are told from the losing end.

Further south, Craters of the Moon at Taupō is the instructive comparison and the cheap one — a geothermal field that also has a known birth date, except that its birth was an accident of a power station in the 1950s rather than a volcano in 1886.