Wednesday, March 11: Sunny becoming cloudier in the afternoon, warm

Tramping: 5.4 km

Astray

• Topo
• GPS

This place is fairly quiet at night after 10:00, but it was the buses and general traffic that woke me before 9:00. Today’s plan was to do the Waimangu ($36) walk with plenty of time lapses and polarised brackets, and to have it fill up the day.

I was at the car park at around 10:30, and had everything ready except for the hat that I had left in the car. Since Waimangu – as opposed to most of the other thermal/volcanic walks – is very shaded that won’t have made too much difference since sunscreen had already been applied.

The first lake – the Emerald Pool – was positively pink this time – probably due to Azolla, the floating fern (possibly A. pinnata). Got a couple of brackets of it, then headed down the hill to Frying Pan Lake which was slightly less steamy than I had in memory. Of course, the Haszard hike had to be undertaken, and Inferno Crater’s lake seemed to be at low tide and not so hot, and was quite easily photographable. Must think about doing some quick time lapse with swallows in it, and doing the minimum pixel method of the lot, which should show their flight paths. Met a couple from not far from Bentleigh, otherwise it was fairly uneventful. Distant shots were too hazy to be of any use capturing. Back down the mountain I did several time lapses of the Marble Terraces, and the Warbrick Terraces were given the same treatment, plus a series of snapshots of a very dry pool at the top. One bus had just left, so the time remaining was spent photographing numerous swans preening themselves, as well as a few other water birds.

Back here, lunch had to be dealt with, then the question of doing the Tarawera Trail tomorrow. Went to the i-site, but there was a long queue. so I grabbed the brochure and went out looking for a telephone – cards only. Wandering about window shopping, the second i-site looked positively overstaffed, so I booked my water taxi from there and will do from the end of the trail to Whakatane tomorrow.

The computer had been working its way through yesterday’s brackets and the hard disk is almost full, so will rename the external picture folder, save the files to a zip archive and remove the files from the local disk.

Went down to the lake but no sunset tonight; instead photographed some black teals bobbing up and down on the lake, and a flock of geese grazing. Then it was to Pizza Capizzi (1198 Tutanekai St) for an eponymous pizza for $21.5 (14”) – far too much and have saved half for tomorrow. Was at least nice & crispy, even though with salami, a real pepperoni, mushrooms, capsicums and olives a wee bit overladen.

Working directory for the photos will now be the external disk G: (label “P”) and I will back it up in future to “V” & keep them separate. Originally “P” was to be devoted to pictures, and “V” to videos, but I won’t be assembling any videos while I’m here.