20May06 Saturday
This afternoon we arrived in Rotorua from Napier. The drive from Napier is very nice with the landscape changing to more rolling hills (mountains?) covered with sheep pastures in vibrant green. It’s amazing how the sheep can cut the grass to look like a finely mown yard. We even had some nice straight stretches of highway on the way.
Joan and I stopped at the McDonald’s in Taupo along the way. They have a DC3 aircraft as part of their site and you can take your lunch to the passenger compartment and eat there. Very unusual. We may go back to Taupo during our extended stay after the end of the Habitat portion of our trip. Lake Taupo is a world renowned trout fishing lake. Last year a few of the guys went fishing there and caught a couple of nice trout that they shared with the rest of us that night in the campground.
Heading north out of Taupo you begin to see and smell the beginning of the natural sulphur springs, geysers, and hot pots. The Crater of the Moon is an interesting stop that we passed by this year. It’s a concentrated area of bubbling hot pots of grey mud and water. Around the edges of these it is colorful with pinks, reds and some yellow deposits of chemicals in the water. A little further on is a large geothermal generating station. There are many large pipes carrying steam coming up from wells they have drilled. Glen and Gwen stopped at a place where the operation was described and they found out that these wells are around 6,000 feet deep. The steam comes up at high pressure and temperature. The large pipes have huge expansion loops that Glen drove their KEA campervan through. Apparently there are plans to expand the generating station in the near future. The mild aroma of hydrogen sulfide permeates the air in a wide radius all around Rotorua.
After checking in at the campervan park a few of us loaded into our campervan and went downtown in search of a restaurant for supper. The selection was large just in one block and we ended up at an English pub named the Plucking Pheasant. They had a nice buffet and we ate well. After that we headed back to the campervan park, donned our bathing suits and went to the hot mineral water pools. The park has a selection of four from which to choose that are of varying temperatures. After soaking in the pool for about an hour and enjoying a conversation with an Aussie couple we headed in for showers.
Coming out of the showers we ran into a guy from Hamilton which isn’t too far from Rotorua and it turned out that he and his wife do a lot of work for Habitat in Hamilton and she coordinates the Global Village short time teams coming from the States that come there. The work of Habitat intertwines people from all over the world. Apparently the Hamilton and Manakau affiliates are the two largest and most active affiliates in New Zealand and build the most houses per year here.
We called Warren Jack, the executive director of the Manakau affiliate today in-route and he said that they will be having us work primarily on one house that will be of wood construction and one of masonry construction next door to each other. The wood house is a slab at the moment and we will be building the walls and doing the framing. The type of construction sounded really different from what we do in the States and even different from the house we worked on in Dunedin. Will find out more as we get into it. The other house of masonry construction was designed by a PhD student at a university there and was described as a post-stressed construction. It is ready for door jambs and some painting. Will report more on that later. We have a get-to-gather Monday evening at the home of one of the affiliate’s directors. It should be an interesting kickoff to the build there.
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