by Bruce Ansley
It has a thermal pool resort and a thermal walking track (‘hidden gems’). A sprawling hotel was built in headier days. People here have their homes and spa pools thermally heated. It should be booming, but is not. Turangi stole its mantle, hydrowise, later in the 1960s.
Turangi offers fishing and walking and biking but you have to go to the less-popular Tokaanu for a dip in a hot thermal pool. Life just isn’t fair. Or perhaps tourists are more wary of the red line than the natives, even if the people here have felt the hot breath of the devil below.
The Tangiwai disaster began when Mount Ruapehu erupted in 1945. The crater lake emptied and its outlet blocked with debris. A new crater lake slowly formed behind the de facto dam. The monster grew slowly until Christmas Eve 1953. Then it tore itself loose and roared down the mountain and into the Whangaehu River.
Disasters have a way of compounding. The Tangiwai railway bridge crossed the Whangaehu a little way east of Waiouru. A bridge pier had already been weakened by the river. The lahar, a lethal mixture of mud, rock and water, finished the job. An express train was approaching and as it was Christmas Eve the train was crowded.
Warned by a brave man with a torch, the driver braked. Too late. The locomotive and five of the nine passenger carriages, then a sixth, plunged into the river. One hundred and fifty-one people died.
In the days of National Service I was drafted into the Army and spent quite a long time — it seemed forever — on the Volcanic Plateau. It was the scariest time I’d had in my young life. We’d be marched over the Plateau in various mystifying exercises which gave me plenty of time to watch the steam over Ruapehu, the neat cloud over Ngauruhoe, and the blasted top of Tongariro.
Of course I wanted to be somewhere else. Every young man plonked into uniform and sent to the coldest, loneliest, most barren place not just in New Zealand but, in our minds, the entire world, wanted to be somewhere else.
Those volcanoes appeared to us to be biding their time. At some intergalactic signal they’d explode, and we’d be atomised.
We camped on ground that seemed to be not soil but a kind of pulverised paste of unearthly colour. The farmers among us discussed trace elements; they felt that a little topdressing was all that was needed to bring the whole Plateau into production. To the rest of us, it was just scrubby and cold. It felt bleak. Its history seeped from the rocks: eruptions, lahars, a million times more violent than the Army with its tanks and shells blasting away. Much later, when Peter Jackson used this area as a setting for the Black Gate of Mordor in Lord of the Rings, the common thought among those young recruits grown older was: Good choice.
New Zealand soldiers sent overseas to dubious battlefields, such as Yugoslavia, Iraq or Afghanistan, clambered over, shot at and dug into the red volcanic soil here. To anyone who has baked their bones under its brassy summer sun, or been frozen brittle in its icy dark, the Plateau seems an appropriate prelude to the military adventure du jour.
Except for tourists, who are always incomprehensible, few stop on the Desert Road running over the Plateau. Even on the tarmac you can feel the thin, rent fabric of the earth’s surface. In places the road dives into the entrails below, and you become a science-fiction adventurer, twisting and turning inside the layers of lahars and volcanic ash and boiled mud and rock ruddy as old blood. As you come spluttering to the surface there’s little relief, for the landscape is sombre, threatening. You do not want to linger. The road traverses the Rangipo Desert, a landscape crisped by thousands of years of volcanic eruptions. Nothing survives here but low bush and wild Kaimanawa horses.
The Desert Road is only sixty-three kilometres long, but you always give a sigh of relief on the sixty-third. It wasn’t a road at all until quite late in New Zealand’s motoring history. It began as a rough track for an intermittent coach service between Taihape and Taupo, but most people didn’t want to go anywhere near the Plateau. They preferred a long detour through Napier and later through Ohakune.
The Desert Road remained little more than a track until the country was tidied up for the royal visit by the new Queen Elizabeth in 1953–54. The road might have been all right for her subjects, but it was far too rough for Her Majesty. Royalty achieved what world war could not: the road was widened and sealed.
I found myself cruising the Volcanic Plateau in 1995, writing about a massive eruption. Volcanologists had first sensed trouble when the Ruapehu crater lake warmed. Steam spouted from its vents. There’d been quite a few smaller eruptions; lahars had run down the mountainsides, some into the Whangaehu. Crater Lake was leaking down the flanks, again.
Then it blew. This was no prelude; it was the main body of the work. Ruapehu wasn’t mucking around. It was really, truly blowing up. For days, lahars smoked into the Whangaehu, the Whakapapaiti, the Mangaturuturu, filling them with volcanic excrement. The snowfields were streaked black. The Army began evacuating families from Waiouru. Sheep and other livestock died after feeding on ash-dressed pasture.
I was working for the New Zealand Listener then, based in the South Island. The editor wanted me to write about the eruption. I flew to Auckland, the pilot staying well clear of Ruapehu’s ash cloud shooting ten kilometres into the air, spreading over land even 300 kilometres away. Perhaps he was thinking of British Airways Flight 9 from London to Auckland, which flew into a cloud of volcanic ash near Jakarta and lost all four engines. If he wasn’t thinking about that, I certainly was.
In Auckland I rented a car and headed for the Plateau. The closer I got the less I liked it. My idea of volcanic activity was to go to Rotorua’s wonderful Blue Baths and lie in geothermally heated water surrounded by art deco architecture and 1930s jazz.
Taupo was excited. People sat in cafés and eagerly discussed the eruptions. Every truly awful thing fascinates people, as long as they’re safely out of its reach.
For three days I swanned around with a photographer. I stayed at a motel in Ohakune. The proprietor was disconsolate. The ski resorts had been closed: skiers had fled the scene with the eruption nipping their backsides; the volcano blew up just as the skiing day was ending.
Boulders were scattered like marbles. Steam and ash were blasted twelve kilometres into the air. A lahar flashed by Whakapapa while departing skiers mopped their brows and fretted over their likely fate had the mountain erupted just a little earlier. Black ash was rotting roofs and ruining pastures and corroding the turbine blades in the Rangipo power station.
I stayed in Turangi. It wasn’t as disconsolate, although I was; Turangi at the best of times can be a little glum, for visitors at least.
The Desert Road was closed, of course. Who would want to get closer? From the gates we could see dirty smoke pouring from the mountain. We could smell the rotten-egg stench of fire and brimstone.
On the world scale Mount Ruapehu is ranked as especially dangerous because of its lethal lahars and its crater lake, millions of cubic metres of acidic water ready to pour down the mountainsides through any crack in the crater wall.
We took the circular route around the mountain, through National Park on the western side. Maps showed that lahars generally laid waste to the eastern side of the mountain. The western side was less beaten-up. Barren on the east, bush on the west. Still, it wasn’t so much that the roundabout road was safer as that it was open. The map showed it dangerously close to a mountain which was at that very moment consolidating its position among the world’s most badly behaved volcanoes, but that didn’t seem to worry the clutch of thrill-seekers who formed an impromptu convoy on the route. Amateur photographers yapped around the mountain like terriers.
There was a vintage car and a couple on a motorbike. The occupants of the old car proceeded sedately. The two bikers and ourselves stopped often, and we had earnest discussions about how to get closer to the action. My own interest was academic. I smelled the volcano’s stink, saw the granite column of ash, imagined the fire and brimstone, and had no intention of getting nearer to it. I was a moth drawn to the flame only by reason of my
craft, and I was certainly not going to be burned.
But I was cowed.
The huge energy of the eruption, its ferocity, its reach, its implacability had shaken me more than I knew. For weeks and months afterwards I imagined the reek, shrank from the force.
The following year Ruapehu erupted again. Ash blasted over the skifields, which opened anyway. Volcanologists were examining that crater lake through leery eyes. What would happen when the acid waters rose so high that they would burst through the dam of volcanic ash blocking its outlet? Why, it would be 1953 all over again.
By January 2005 the lake was up to its brim. The next year, 2006, it erupted; a small eruption, a mere burp by Ruapehu’s standards. Still, a great plume of water shot into the air and mighty waves beat the crater wall.
On 18 March 2007 the mountain again spat its contents over the countryside. The crater lake smashed through its dam. A huge lahar crashed down into the Whangaehu River. But the authorities had been warned and had closed roads and railways. A family were trapped in their home when their access way was swept away. All scary, but not too serious by Ruapehu standards.
On the evening of 25 September 2007, the mountain repeated the performance. This one was seriously frightening. There was no warning: the eruption simply sneaked up and let loose, taking everyone — volcanologists, local experts, the mountain industry — by surprise.
William Pike, an Auckland schoolteacher and mountaineer, lost the lower part of a leg when a boulder crashed into the hut he and a companion were sleeping in, crushing his leg. The rock was too heavy for his friend to lift.
I could imagine them both struggling in the dark while the world crashed around them. The terror, and oh, the pain.
Pike didn’t waste the experience. He became a motivational speaker and led a youth-development programme.
Ruapehu erupts constantly. In 2012 it spewed huge boulders up to two kilometres. A vast ash cloud twenty-five kilometres long and fifteen wide travelled at sixty kilometres per hour. The sulphur could be smelled in Nelson and Blenheim. State Highway One was closed along with the surrounding airspace, and people in nearby homes legged it for safety.
A little north of Ruapehu lies Mount Ngauruhoe, a child’s drawing of a volcano, beautifully symmetrical with a puff of smoke at its top. The mountain is judged to be peaceful — at the moment. New Zealand volcanoes are rather like the tiger in the Cambridgeshire zoo, which was peaceful and beautiful right up to the time it killed a keeper.
The huge boulders which lie around the Plateau, the weird shapes and colours of the hammered earth, the reluctance of any living thing, animal or vegetable, to put down roots into the ruddy ground, all proclaimed this to be a place best left alone.
One of the best descriptions of Ngauruhoe was penned by an early explorer and climber, John Bidwill, who toiled up its flanks in March 1839: ‘Had it not been for the idea of standing where no [Pakeha] man ever stood before, I should certainly have given up the undertaking.’ Then he peered into the crater and was aghast: ‘The crater was the most terrific abyss I ever looked into or imagined’.
Staring into the raw innards of the earth reduces the watcher to a wisp.
Then Tongariro. The top of the mountain tells of tremendous explosions, because most of it is missing. Instead, the volcano ends on a jagged line of cones at odds with its comely neighbour (and vent) Ngauruhoe.
A geologist who climbed the mountain on New Year’s Day, 1893 (on a jaunt with women and children), after an eruption the previous November, reported that ‘the mountain . . . was rent in twain by an enormous fissure . . . Vast quantities of poisonous gases were rising from the rift, and the whole area on the north side of the rift was a seething mass of sulphur.’
The short story is, you don’t mess with volcanoes. You try to have nothing to do with them. You get as far from them as possible, and especially from the Volcanic Plateau, which is among the world’s most active.
Unless you’re part of what is called the visitor industry. For many, the stink of sulphur is the sweet smell of success.
Further down the red line, along the highway between Wairakei (itself a thermal resort) and Rotorua, lies a faded little town called Golden Springs. It has a thermal stream running through its holiday park, but it seems rather lonely. No one I could find knew why it was called ‘Golden’, for no hint of the precious metal or its colour hangs about the place.
Not far from Rotorua’s hot water and bubbling mud, Mount Tarawera crouches.
On 10 June 1886 Tarawera erupted, destroyed the Pink and White Terraces on Lake Rotomahana and killed some 120 people. Today you can visit the so-called Buried Village and walk over their bones. This is proclaimed as New Zealand’s most-visited archaeological site. Currently, it will cost you $30. Of the Pink and White Terraces, said to have been the eighth wonder of the world, nothing remains.
I went back to Rotorua for the night. It’s the red-line capital, where anyone with so much as a bubble in their backyard advertises a thermal pool. This is the place where the fiery underbelly turns a buck, where a whole industry balances on the hell below, rather like balancing on the lid of a kettle.
I stopped at an inviting motel, defined as one advertising spas in their units plus special rates. I was cautious. Several people have died after falling into boiling mud pools, and more have expired from hydrogen sulphide poisoning in motel hot pools.
This had a spa pool right in the unit, half as big again as the combined living-bedroom. It was a worn, cracked affair, so noisy the manager asked me not to use it too late in the evening so others could get to sleep. I took one look and resolved not to use it at all, then discovered it doubled as the shower base — the shower head was sticking out of the wall above. Truly, I was looking deep into the heart of volcanic New Zealand.
I’d been curious about White Island since I sailed past it once in an old wooden boat, making my way from Auckland to Picton. At first, I was astonished by the smell: a scorched, eggy stench that rolled across the ocean and left its taste for hours.
I knew that White Island lay alongside the route, but was unprepared for the presence: a reeking, smoking heap, red-hot, glowing and fading like a coke fire in a breeze.
This is the far end of that red line from the Volcanic Plateau, a light in the dark, a boil on the surface of the sea, a supernatural presence in the night. Beyond White Island the line disappears into a string of undersea volcanoes.
The island stands forty-eight kilometres offshore in the Bay of Islands. Most of it lies unseen, for it is the top of a volcano rising from the sea floor. If you stood on its top, which is not recommended, you’d be as far above sea level as another of New Zealand’s great tourist attractions, Queenstown.
White Island is New Zealand’s most active cone volcano. Its danger levels ebb and flow like the tides around it. A pohutukawa forest once survived on its scratchy slopes until eruptions in the early 1980s disposed of it. Now the island looks like a molar in serious decay.
White Island was more active between 1975 and 2001 than it had been for centuries. It blew rock, gas and ash as high in the air as its big brother Ruapehu at the other end of the line. What might a truly massive eruption, one that White Island is certainly capable of, do to the populous Bay of Plenty? That’s a question the people in this calm and beautiful region don’t even want to contemplate.
Amazingly, people want to visit this island. They are, mainly, international tourists rather than New Zealanders. Perhaps the natives live too close to the fiery mountains to tempt fate by walking right inside one.
Volcanoes are part of the New Zealand vernacular. Not so for foreigners. The chance to look inside a volcano and come out uncrisped is too attractive.
That’s how I felt too. That’s why I was aboard a big White Island Tours launch skimming over the forty-eight kilometres of water between Whakatane and White Island. The volcanic alert level was currently one, the lowest, indicating minor volcanic unrest. While people are still taken to the island
when activity reaches level two, indicating moderate to heightened volcanic unrest, I was happy with level one. Volcano-watching could be dangerous to life and limb, as many of those who observed the Mount St Helens eruption in Washington State could testify — the ones who survived, that is.
Levels three to five describe actual eruptions from minor upwards, during which the island is off-limits to even the most dedicated thrill-seekers. But the tour operators warned that volcanic alert levels were shifty and not to be entirely trusted, for volcanoes are impetuous beasts and can erupt at any time. If this one did, advice on what to do was remarkably similar to that dispensed in the event of the eruptions’ near cousins, earthquakes: avoid as many dangers as you can, find cover and hold. It reminded me a little of the old line about what to do in a nuclear explosion: assume the brace position and kiss your arse goodbye.
But nothing prepared me for the reality. I stepped off the beach into another world. Toxic craters bubbled all around. Had Macbeth’s witches appeared, everyone would have congratulated them on their choice:
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble . . .
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
It was a Shakespearean world with Disney overtones. The setting was in Technicolour: primitive purples and reds and yellows. Craters were named Donald Duck, Noisy Nellie, Big John, Gulliver, Rudolf.
Gouts of steam rose from vents like ghosts, and one of them might have been Donald Pye, who was a fireman when the island was producing sulphur. He disappeared one night and all they found of him were his boots. Yet it was easy enough to imagine what might have happened. The track ran alongside solid-looking mounds whose crusts were in fact fragile. If you stepped on one, that might be the last step you ever took.
Eleven sulphur miners (the number is still uncertain) vanished, atomised along with their buildings, in 1914. Men and buildings disappeared forever under a lahar of boiling mud, ash and rock. A single tabby cat survived, dubbed Peter the Great. The rescuers took him back to Opotoki, where he became famous, fathered lots of kittens and lived happily on his rep for the rest of his life.