Huka Falls

Why it matters

The interesting thing about Huka is not the drop. Eleven metres is nothing — there are farm culverts with more fall. What makes it worth the trip is the arithmetic of the squeeze: a river a hundred metres wide, carrying the outflow of the largest lake in New Zealand, forced without warning into a slot fifteen metres across and made to travel two hundred metres of it before it is allowed to fall.

The slot is not rock in the ordinary sense. The Waikato here has cut down into lake-floor sediments laid down before the Ōruanui eruption 26,500 years ago — the ground that was the bottom of an older lake, compacted and welded hard enough to hold a channel this narrow against that much water. The falls exist because the river found a seam it could not widen.

And there is a fact about Huka Falls that almost nothing written about it mentions: the volume is partly a decision. The Waikato is the country's most heavily worked hydro river, and Mercury can hold the flow anywhere between 50 and 319 cubic metres a second, with the regional council calling the tune when there is flooding downstream. The 220 you will probably see is a typical setting rather than a natural constant. Ten kilometres further on, at Aratiatia, the same company opens a dam to a published timetable and fills a gorge for a quarter of an hour. Two of Taupō's three great water spectacles are, to a degree, operated — which is either a disappointment or the most modern thing about them, depending on your temperament.

What it's like

You hear it from the car park, before the path turns. Not a roar — a low, continuous, structural sound, more like heavy plant than weather, and it does not rise and fall the way surf does. Then the path opens onto the footbridge and the whole thing is directly beneath you: a chute of water moving far too fast for its own surface, so pale with trapped air that it reads as pale blue-white rather than as river, ribbed with standing waves that do not travel because the water is going faster than the waves can.

The colour is the surprise. Photographs make it turquoise and photographs are right, but they cannot convey that the colour is a texture — the blue of the deep pool at the end against the opaque white of the chute, meeting in a line that shifts and reforms and never resolves. The bridge transmits it. You feel the volume through the handrail before you have worked out what you are looking at.

How to visit

By car or bike it is five minutes from the middle of Taupō on Huka Falls Road. From the car park a 167-metre path, about ten minutes there and back, reaches the footbridge and the lookouts; tracks run along both banks if you want longer.

On foot from town is the better way to arrive, and it is the one most visitors never consider. The Spa Park to Huka Falls walk is 3 km and about 90 minutes one way, graded Easiest by DOC, following the river the whole distance. It passes the Otumuheke Stream, which comes out of the ground hot and runs into the Waikato — a free thermal soak twenty minutes from your accommodation. Arrange a lift back from the falls car park, or turn around and make a half-day of it.

From the water, jet boats and river cruises run up to the pool at the foot of the chute — close enough for spray. That is the one view you cannot get on foot, and the only part of a Huka Falls visit that costs anything.

Making the most of it

Walk in, don't drive in. The falls arrive abruptly from the car park — thirty seconds of path and you are on the bridge — and abruptness is the enemy here. Coming along the river from Spa Park you hear it building for a quarter of an hour before you see it, which is how the place is meant to be met.

Go early or late. The middle of the day brings the coaches and flattens the colour; low light does the opposite, throwing the blue of the pool against the white of the chute. The overnight gate closure means the very earliest visit has to be on foot, which is no bad thing.

Give it two visits, not one. Five minutes is enough to see Huka Falls and not nearly enough to watch it. Almost everyone who stops for the photograph finds themselves back on the bridge later in the day, and the second visit is the one people remember.

Pair it with the timetable. Aratiatia's dam gates open at 10am, noon and 2pm, with a fourth at 4pm from October to March. Huka has no timetable, so build the day around Aratiatia's and fit the falls either side of it.

Nearby

Everything is on the same short road north. Craters of the Moon, the open geothermal field on the Wairakei ground, is a 40-minute boardwalk loop five minutes away. Aratiatia Rapids is ten minutes further on, and worth timing a day around. The Wairakei power station sits between them, quietly explaining why the river behaves as it does.

Back the other way, Taupō itself is five minutes and the lake is the reason the river exists. An hour and a quarter south, the Tongariro Alpine Crossing is the other thing people come to the central North Island for, and it needs a whole day and its own planning.