Taupo Volcanic Zone by Andrew Bain

In AD 186 Roman and Chinese writers recorded months of blood-red sunsets, the sky stained with volcanic ash. What they were witnessing was not the blast of a Sicilian or Kamchatkan volcano but the world’s largest volcanic explosion of the last 5000 years, in one of the furthest removed points on the planet – New Zealand.

The passing years have not quelled New Zealand’s geological indigestion. Here, as the thinner Pacific earth plate is being drawn under the Indo-Australian plate, heating and melting as it does so, geothermal activity is a constant.

New Zealand’s volcanoes erupt with a frequency that is almost unparalleled. In the USA, Mount St Helens erupts around every 700 years. In the Philippines, Pinatubo blows about every 200 years. In New Zealand, Mount Ruapehu explodes about every second or third year and White Island averages a yearly eruption.

Ruapehu and White Island form the geographic extremities of the Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand’s most active volcanic area. Running for 250 kilometres through the centre of the North Island, it’s punctured by 17 geothermal fields and at least six volcanoes. I’m drawn to the area almost every time I visit New Zealand, to its otherworldly landscapes and its all-too-worldly sulphur smells. It can be seen in days or weeks, piecemeal or in its entirety. Most recently, I chose the latter, to read the complete volcanic book rather than just its chapters.

I began in Rotorua, odor capital of New Zealand, and something of the eye of the volcanic storm – it’s been almost 120 years since anything really big blew here. Anywhere else and that’d be the equivalent of a volcanic catnap but in New Zealand it’s closer to an eternity. Geothermal fields surround Rotorua, making it the North Island’s premier tourist destination, despite the cloying stench of sulphur that hovers like a fart in a boy’s dormitory.

In the 1870s the town’s tourist flame burned even brighter. The nearby Pink and White Terraces – fanned silica terracing on the lake edge of the volcano Mount Tarawera – were billed as the eighth wonder of the world, drawing international tourism at a time when it took weeks of travel for most people just to reach New Zealand. But in a stunning eruption on June 10, 1886, Tarawera obliterated the terraces. Seven villages were destroyed and around 120 people killed.

Today, it is Tarawera itself that is part of the tourist radar; its drawcard, a 17-kilometre line of summit craters that formed when the mountain cracked like an egg in the 1886 eruption.

It was my original intention to walk to the craters, to savor the mountain and feel it in footstep time, but private access was banned in September 2002. Thefts from cars and disrespect for tapu (sacred to Maori) areas of the mountain prompted the ban, though others say that’s a half-truth, that commercial gain also played its part. Regardless, there was only one way I was getting up Tarawera, and that was by the sanctioned tour.

We drove for an hour from Rotorua, circling Tarawera like a foe, the mountain always looming as dark as a storm cloud. As we crawled up its bumpy, thickly forested slopes, signs warned of around-the-clock security cameras and staff and prosecution for trespassers. It felt as though we were stealing into NASA.

Atop the mountain we came to the main crater, a gaping wound that haemorrhaged over the North Island on that 1886 night, sending smoke and ash up to 10 kilometres into the sky.

Tarawera’s inner slopes were a slippery gravel mix of red scoria, black basalt and white rhyolite, down which we walked, stumbled and slid to the crater floor. Low cloud drifted in and out of the crater, creating an ephemeral volcanic image, geothermal activity where there was no longer any, unlike across in nearby Tongariro National Park.

New Zealand’s first national park, Tongariro is the site of three grand volcanoes: Mounts Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro. To get here from Rotorua, I skirted Lake Taupo, the now-placid lake that formed in the caldera of the enormous AD 186 eruption.

What always strikes me is New Zealanders’ offhand regard for this unpredictable trio of volcanoes. When Ruapehu erupted in 1996, people continued skiing on its slopes, and around 30,000 sightseers turned up to watch its fireworks.

But, then, where I see fumaroles and menace, New Zealanders see the everyday. To drive between Auckland and Wellington you pass directly beneath the mountains. They have become roadside scenery, not threats, despite their muted hazard and their tempestuous habits. On Christmas Eve 1953, more than 150 people were killed in a train accident when a Ruapehu eruption destroyed a railway bridge.

I was out before dawn along the Desert Road – the misnomer of New Zealand’s only ‘desert’, which receives more rain than Wellington but doesn’t hold water – heading through cuttings of ash eroded into Gaudi-like shapes, the mountains wearing a semi-permanent cap of cloud as though in perpetual eruption.

I was circling once again, edging around the mountains’ base as if subconsciously anxious about their activity. But this is not a place you come just to drive and stare. These mountains are the North Island’s adventure playground. In winter Ruapehu becomes the island’s only ski field, and in summer hundreds come each day to walk the 17-kilometre Tongariro Crossing, a route almost unanimously billed as ‘New Zealand’s finest day walk’.

The Crossing files between Ngauruhoe and Tongariro and is like a coffee-table book of volcanic panoramas – angry red craters, dribbles of yellow sulphur, dazzling green lakes near its conclusion. It then tips off the mountain, past the steaming (but tapu) Ketetahi hot pools and back to the road, where a fleet of shuttle services wait to transport walkers back to the surrounding towns.

From here, I made for the coast, towards White Island, the volcanic peak in the ocean that has been in near-constant eruption for nearly 30 years. Even more than the perfect volcanic shape of Mount Ngauruhoe, White Island embodies New Zealand’s subterranean fury.

As though exiled because of its threat, it sits 50 kilometres off the Bay of Plenty coast, and has long served as a windsock for the coastal town of Whakatane. A mushroom cloud of steam would form above the island on still days; tendrils of stream stretched elastically across the sky on windy days. Fishermen needed only look from their windows to assess ocean conditions.

But that all stopped shortly before my visit. For the first time in recorded history the central vent of the volcano had been covered by a crater lake. The steam clouds were doused, but the threat may have grown, for Ruapehu’s 1996 eruption was preceded by this very kind of crater flooding.

As we made our ocean approach, the island presented a slumbering, benign appearance. But leaping ashore at Crater Bay, the only weakness in the crater rim, was like entering a forewarning of hell. Ahead, the crater wall rose to 321 metres (and dipped another 450 metres below the ocean), the smell was like Rotorua on extra beans, and fumaroles hissed like industrial machinery, their steam rising like smoke from spot fires. Nothing grew inside the crater, and ash and acid had burned away the leaves of every tree and bush on its outer walls. At the edge of the bay sat the skeleton of a former sulphur mining operation.

Early last century there had been four attempts to mine the island, but all went bankrupt overestimating the quantity and purity of the sulphur, and perhaps underestimating the dangers. Some workers were said to brush their teeth five times a day in an attempt to stop them going black (even today, island guides go through shoes and backpacks at a rapid rate, so acidic is the air and ground). In 1914, a lahar (volcanic mudslide) killed all 10 miners on the island (though their cat survived). White Island changes its appearance almost daily. Rains wash away its sulphur coating, fumaroles appear and disappear, and craters flare and diminish. A few years ago, I made a visit that coincided with weeks of dry conditions and, so thick was the sulphur dusting, the island resembled a flower in pollen. This time it was less colorful – a jaundiced yellow punctuated with brilliant sulphurous fumaroles – but more foreboding. We crossed the barren crater, dipping through yellow-streaked creeks and over earth as red as sunburn. Finally, we climbed to a crumbling precipice above the central crater, its flooded floor 60 metres below the ocean level. The slopes above the submerged vent sweated steam, as did the green lake, true to its soupy appearance.

It might not have been the smoking gun so familiar to Whakatane residents, but White Island was again cocked and loaded. Was New Zealand about to tear itself open yet again? Rome and Beijing awaited the outcome.