There's something slightly surreal about standing on top of something so volcanically active that it's hissing steam in every direction and spewing tonne after tonne of sulphurous gas into the air around you. It's kind of like walking around a crowd of sleeping dragons - you're walking around happy as larry, but know in the back of your mind that could be blown to smitherines in a nothing more than a flash. Welcome to White Island.Things have happened pretty damn quickly in the last 24 hours or so. The twenty20 at The Mount was good fun, featuring quite a few big names including Kiwis' international captain Daniel Vettori and Sri Lankan superstar Tilekeratne Dilshan - the latter turning up by helicopter just minutes before the start of the game, only to make a poultry 4 thanks to a phenomenal catch at mid-on. It was also a fantastic backdrop for catching up with Joe and her husband - when I'd last seen her (leaving Judd in 2006) she was still Miss Cole - and was followed by some lovely grub down in Mount Maunganui's town centre strip.
Staying in Pacific Coast Lodge right next to the cricket ground, I was up early at 6.15 to climb the town's eponymous mountain as the sun rose over the town. To give some inkling into the lifestyle of your average Kiwi, the number of people walking, jogging, or pushing baby-laden strollers up the steep ascent at that ungodly hour was into the hundreds. They really love their activities here.
Back at the hostel a couple of hours later, and I seriously needed to sort my life out and figure out what I was doing with myself over the coming days and how I was going to get there. After talking at dinner last night, my prime aim was to get to Whakatane - an hour's drive east of the Mount - and get myself onto a tour of White Island. The latter fell nicely into place with the news that extra demand had made them put on a third daily tour departing at 12.30. The issue was how to get there.
Outside of Auckland and the bigger cities, public transport in New Zealand is pretty useless. Trains basically don't exist, and buses either don't come/go to where you need/want them, or when they do they do it at stupid o'clock. From the Mount to Whakatane, for example, runs a solitary daily bus, but it doesn't run at weekends. Useless.
The best option, according to the Lodge's proprietor Murray, was to hitch-hike. NZ is very pro-hitching, and drivers are very receptive. Murray reckoned it'd take me 20mins to grab a ride from right outside the hostel. 5 minutes later, it had taken even less - an Austrian girl working as an au pere in Wellington was driving her parents around North Island while they were visiting, and they were on their way to the very same White Island ferry as myself. Happy days.
Now that Whakatane had fallen into place, I was lucky to take up Joe and Simon's offer of a bed for the night, so dropped my bags off with them before beginning the 6 hour trip - 90 minutes cruise each way, and a couple of hours guided tour into the depths of the smoking, hissing, pungent volcanic crater. Photos and a suitably vivid (and, thanks to my new camera, High Definiton) video will appear in due course. When you're a kid, you wonder how ridiculous it'd be to sit on top of a volcano...when you're actually there, on top of the most active site in New Zealand, you're just in awe of the power Mother Nature has at her disposal.
A shower, washing machine and lovely dinner awaited back in Whakatane (delicious steak and kidney pie, calorific death-by-chocolate for dessert), and tomorrow it's off to Rotorua - a.k.a. RotoVegas, a.k.a. Fart City...
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