Volcanoes, Astronomers, and Bedbugs, Oh My!

Warning: This is a long one, so I included subtitles. Feel free to skim!

I left Auckland eager to discover the iconic green, bleating countryside of New Zealand, and find it I did. In the bus all the way to Taupo I feasted my eyes on green pastures, sheep and golfers. Then I arrived at my hostel and the romance was lost; I immediately missed my friends that I’d made at Oaklands Lodge in Mt Eden. However, it turned out to be a fantastic Christmas with some fun new friends, and I went skydiving for the first time. But in truth, I stayed in Taupo too long.

TongarirNo Crossing
I had wanted to stay in Taupo long enough to get one nice day for skydiving and one nice day for the Tongariro Crossing, the highly lauded “best day-hike in New Zealand” featuring blue crater lakes and Mount Ngauruhoe (the “Mt. Doom” volcano of Lord of the Rings fame), among other natural wonders. On the 10th day in Taupo I eagerly boarded the bus to the Crossing's trail head, happy to leave, and excited for the hike, but more than a little nervous about the looming clouds. The bus pulled into the car park (Kiwi for “parking lot”—still elicits visions of an amusement park for or with cars) from whence I was to start the tramp, and our driver promptly announced over the loud speaker, “Folks, you’re not going to like what I have to tell you now. We’ve just now received word that all walks for the day must be cancelled due to heavy rain and strong winds on the mountain.” BUMMER! I had had it with Taupo and was very much ready to move on from there, so I decided without reservation that Tongariro Crossing was just not meant to happen for me this time and I’ll just have to wait until next time. I did have a fantastic time skydiving at least!

Whakatane
Next on my agenda: Whakatane. Pronounced FAH-kuh-taun-ee, the small town at the mouth of the Whakatane River appealed to me from the moment I first heard of it. The word “Whakatane” means “to act like a man” in Maori. As legend has it, the first Maori men to arrive in what’s now Whakatane eagerly hopped out of the waka (canoe) soon after it was pulled up on the beach, leaving the first Maori women and children to arrive there sitting in the waka. The tide came in quickly, and began pulling the waka back out into the ocean. It is strictly forbidden for women to paddle the canoes, which are sacred (go figure), thus causing quite the conundrum. Wairaka, the daughter of the chief who captained the waka (canoe) declared “Kia whakatane ake au i ahau” (“Let me act as a man”), and paddled everyone and everything safely back to shore. There is a very beautiful statue of Wairake perched on a boulder at the mouth of the river. Though, I must say that there is nothing ‘whakatane’ about it, and I don’t quite see how it’s meant to represent “girl power” as it were. I reckon it might even offend the odd feminist, or seem a bit ironic at best. Perhaps I'm just missing the point.

Statue of Lady Wairaka

Anyway, I had actually never read anything about the town of Whakatane in my travel books and am happy to report that, for now, it is a well-kept secret! Christina (from Christmas in Taupo) showed me her pictures of Whakatane’s key feature, White Island, which is New Zealand’s only active marine volcano and lies about 50 km off the east coast from Whakatane. The brilliant sulfur color overwhelming present in Christina’s photos was more than enough to attract this chromophile to the charms of the island. I booked the tour for noon the day after I arrived and woke up that morning to the first cloudless day of my whole vacation. Yay!
White Island was extraordinary. It’s an extremely active rock, but is not the kind of volcano that spews molten lava. Instead it steams and bubbles, glowing yellow with hot sulfur. At its center is the crater lake which scientists estimate to be 90 meters deep. They can’t verify the guess very easily, as they are certain that the lake’s pH is a staggeringly acidic -1. It was like being on Mars walking across White Island, and apparently recent studies have shown that Mars and White Island are composed a lot of the same chemical or rock, the name of which I of course cannot remember! But it was just stunningly surreal, impressively interesting, and hauntingly memorable. I thoroughly loved it. We also saw some dolphins on the way there and they played in the wake of the boat.

Me, standing on White Island. For more pictures of White Island, click here.

When I arrived back at my hostel it was around 7pm and I wasn’t ready for the beautiful day to be over. I made dinner and consulted my Lonely Planet and Let’s Go books. I had read about an Astronomical Society in Whakatane with an observatory open to the public several nights a week. A German girl named Raissa who was also staying in my hostel decided that she wanted to come too, so I called and found out that it wasn’t open. But it was such a clear, lovely night that Norman, the “president” (?) of the astronomical society said he would be happy to show us some stars. Norman was probably hovering right around 70, and his astronomical knowledge of stars was proportionate. His enthusiasm for astronomy, though, was gleefully adolescent. Pretty much the most adorable man ever. In the end, we came home from the observatory around 12:30am a lot more knowledgeable about the universe. Norm showed us the moon and its craters, the Tarantula and Orion nebulae, and Venus in the telescope. It was the first time I ever looked through a telescope. It was very, very cool.
Norm, Raissa, and I were joined about two hours in by two more Germans staying at a different hostel. Norm was very happy to tell us everything he knew about the universe and would have kept us there until the sun came up if it hadn’t clouded over. He even showed us his “wishlist” which all donations from tours go toward fulfilling. It was very, very kind of him and he was just delightful. I forgot to mention that he picked us up from the hostel so we didn’t have to walk all the way up the bluff to the observatory and back to the hostel in the dark. He was one of those people that I’d like to shrink, put and my pocket and take out when I need to smile. The man was as sweet as a Kiwifruit.

A gorgeous sunset as seen from the front porch of my hostel in Whakatane.

"Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite" - seriously, you'll most certainly regret it if you do.

There's a reason why this saying exists. And it manifested itself all over approximately 50% of my upper body in the form of itchy, blisterlike welts. The first night I was in my hostel in Whakatane I was the last of the entire house (of maybe 10?) to go to sleep. As I crept into bed, the beam of my flashlight managed to spot 3-4 reddish brown mini-roachlike creatures apparently doing the same. Disgusted, I brushed them off my sheet, telling myself that there was nothing I could do about it right that second as everyone else was asleep, and that it was probably some weird New Zealand cockroach anyway. Bed bugs had crossed my mind, but, as I have the tendency to catastrophize, I told myself that they were far too big to be bed bugs, which must be as invisible as lice or fleas (cringe), right? Wrong. Two mornings later, this is what my arm looked like:

(And what my other arm, chest, and neck looked like too). Figuring that I'd been feasted upon by mosquitoes at the observatory (I have caramel blood, so hefty numbers of bug bites are not unusual to me), I went to town in search of some anti-itch cream. I was greeted by pharmacists and information center volunteers with cautious stares and the suggestion that I had fleas "or worse, bed bugs," respectively. Frantic, I returned home and logged onto the internet (blessedly pirated and therefore free, and therefore not leaching the bank account, as internet does in NZ) in order to Google Image 'bed bugs'. As I was very stressed about this, I had gotten myself a snack while I waited for the photo to load. As I saw the image of exactly what I'd brushed out of my sheets two nights prior appear in front of me, I nearly vomited up my snack.

After telling the hostel staff about what I'd seen, I set to washing all my clothes in the hottest water I could come by. The hostel manager set off a "bug bomb" in the bedroom, much to my relief which crumbled the minute she told me "It's for fleas". The closer bedtime came, the more panicked I became. I decided to scour the bed for any evidence of live bedbugs so that I could show the hostel staff and ask for a new bed. That evidence came in the form of a smaller bug about the size of a poppy seed whose coloring seemed suspiciously close to that of my own blood. I ziplocked the little guy and ran once again to my computer to find yet another image of bed bugs, this one showing the bed bug in all 6 of its wretched life cycles (the second of which resembled my ziplocked specimen, and the sixth of which looked like those who had escaped me two nights prior). I was given a new room.

Nearly a week later, the bites have almost healed completely. They still itch occasionally, but the swelling and redness have gone down to the point where people can look me in the eye again while conversing with me, which is good.

All in all, it was a wild trip stocked to the brim with high highs and low lows. I'm glad I did it, and I'm glad it's over!