Ant bites and mud pools

It seems that garden locations can come at a price. This morning when we were packing the tent away, I took a glass into the kitchen to be washed, and only realised as I put it down that it was crawling with ants after a night lying on the grass outside the tent. "Phew", I thought, "I was lucky not to get bitten." Hah. An hour down the road, I noticed some red bumps on my leg, and one on my hand. More and more bumps appeared on our way to Rotorua, and they got bigger, redder, and itchier, until I could count eight on my right hand, one on my left hand, eight on my right foot and nine on my left foot and leg. They must have been all over me and I never noticed - I guess there is some sort of anaesthetic in their bite so I just wasn't aware of it at the time.

In Rotorua I picked up some antihistamine cream at the chemist, and we headed out to explore. Rotorua is most famous for its geothermal activity, with lots of boiling pools of water and hot mud, often in people's gardens. It is quite common to cook food in the hot water, and our campsite (Cosy Cottage, $32) even had cooking pots and recipe suggestions to use in their own cooking pool. The camp site had fairly basic facilities, but compensated for these by providing spa pools with hot water, so people could make use of the natural heat. We didn't bother, though. Instead, we took a long walk along the lake edge oohing and aahing whenever we saw some particularly impressive bit of steam. It is so strange to see steam rising from an otherwise perfectly normal looking body of water - it is almost like an early morning mist, but it keeps going all day.

As well as steam and mud pools, we did see some pretty buildings and a very impressive-looking museum, but people really don't go to Rotorua for those. The clouds of steam were quite choking in places, and of course the steam is full of sulphur, so we were trying not to breathe too deeply when the wind was blowing our way, but it was still really interesting to walk around and see everything. We were in one particular park which had dozens of boiling pools, all fenced off, but then there was one little pool by itself at the edge of the road, quietly simmering as it waited for some careless person to put their foot in it. I suppose that kind of thing just appears from time to time without warning, in such an unstable area, but it was quite strange to see it there without so much as a warning sign.