Lake Taupo New Zealand Visitor Information  

Lake Taupo:
Welcome to the visitor information for the amazing Taupo region of New Zealand. 
 
Taupo has the the largest freshwater lake in Australasia and offers a smorgasboard of adrenaline pumping activities, geothermal wonders and tourism attractions, which include: bungy jumping, parasailing, white water rafting, trout fishing, horsetrekking kayaking and much more.
 
A great holiday destination in both winter and summer, New Zealand's largest lake was created by volcanic activity approx. 2000 years ago. 
 
Since the first trout was released into the lake around a hundred years ago, it's abundance of Brown and Rainbow trout attract fishermen from all over the world and it is now one of the last true wild trout fisheries in the world.

Taupo's Tideless Sea
Serene appearances deceive. This vast lake ­its six hundred and six square kilometres make it more a tideless sea - is the legacy of Almost unimaginable violence.
 
Taupo is more than a lake. It is a volcano with no top - or a volcano that blew its top again and again in one of the most devastating eruptions ever detected in our planet's past.
 
There had been earlier eruptions here three hundred and thirty, and twenty thousand years ago, but the last, in about AD 135 sent sheets of red hot rock and debris soaring faster than the speed of sound more than two thousand metres high over the summits of rival volcanoes to the south.
 
It bombed and buried forests and left much of the North Island a dusty desert.
 
Airborne ash rained down darkly as far north as present-day Auckland, and south as far as present-day Wellington. Rivers changed course.
 
The statistics are staggering.
 
Enough material was emitted from this giant crater to bury all of New Zealand to a depth of forty-five metres, although most fell within the volcanic region itself.
 
It was a far greater eruption than that of the Mediterranean's Santorini, or Indonesia's Kra­katoa.
 
But in AD 135, New Zealand had no inhabitants to witness or suffer Taupo's last lake ­making explosion.
 
The story of that event was written not in human hand, but in the rock and pumice of the Volcanic Plateau.

The Maori had two names for Taupo
Taupo Moana or 'Sea of Taupo' acknowledged its dimen­sions;
 
Taupo-hau-rau or 'Taupo of the Hundred Winds' acknowledged its unpredictable nature.
 
The waters, one minute peaceful and next vicious, are subject to sudden whims of weather passing over the high heart of the North Island.
 
Polynesians whose ancestors had chanced voyages of two thousand nautical miles or more to reach New Zealand seemed to find the lake far more fearful than the open Pacific.
 
'Worse than the sea,' they warned one early European explorer.
 
They would not paddle directly across it; they cautiously and laboriously followed the shore, from bay to bay, and even then only after lengthy meditation.
 
This was not only due to the risk of change in the weather; they believed a taniwha or water monster, dwelled deep in the lake, and sometimes surfaced to create commotion, overturn vessels and destroy humans.
 
It is likely the story originated not only in Taupo's sensitivity to wind change, but also in residual volcanic shifts.
 
Europeans who have been caught in an abrupt and rather mystifying Taupo storm far from shore, are less inclined to laugh at legend.
 
One nineteenth-century missionary who mocked the lake, seemed to bring tragedy to the tribesmen he was trying to convert. In the end, he moved elsewhere.
 
The tale of the taniwha dies hard.
 
As late as the nineteen-eighties the lake was plumbed for a antipodean version of the Loch Ness monster by a team of credulous Australians, even though no prehistoric creature could be living in its midst, since the lake as we know it now is less than two thousand years old.
 
The Taupo environment is still volcanically active.
 
To the south of the lake above Waihi village, the cliffs steam and hot streams flow into the lake.
 
More than fifty people perished here when honeycombed cliffs collapsed in 1846.
 
There was another landslide with only one fatality in 1910.
 
At nearby Tokaanu the atmosphere is sulphurous with thermal activity, and small geysers and steaming fissures spit on the Taupo golf course.
 
Thermal waters warm homes, hotels and motels to the north of the lake, and the thermal field at Wairakei is harnessed for elec­tricity by a geothermal power station.

Rogue geysers near by are not uncommon.
 
Yet chance of a second sky-blackening cataclysm in anyone resident's lifetime seems remote, however much volcanologists may mutter.
 
The shores of the lake were densely settled in pre-European times; in recent decades they have been again.
 
The Maori who dwelled here must have felt compensated by the thermally warmed lakeshore during the sometimes bitter winters of the area.
 
There were plenty of small native fish, the kokopu and inanga, and freshwater crayfish, the koura.
 
Freshwater mussels, the kakahi, provided another nourishing food source.
 
There were no eels, for eels need the sea to spawn, but there were duck, and pigeon to be trapped in patches of forest that had survived volcanic devastation.
 
There was a little horticulture where rivers and streams had built up deposits of fertile silt in areas above the inhospitable pumice.
 
Nineteenth century Europeans apparently found no great incentive to settle the Taupo district After all, it sat in a landscape one early missionary called 'desolate beyond description.
 
Thousands and thousands of acres without Tree or Shrub ... of the great and terrible wilderness spoken of in Scripture.'
 
But missionaries had souls to save; and soon soldiers had rebels to subdue.
 
The town of Taupo began as an Armed Con­stabulary outpost during Te Kooti's long and bloody campaign against the colonists in the late eighteen-sixties.
 
Not far from the east shore of the lake at Opepe, nine patrolling troopers were slain. At Te Porere to the south, Te Kooti's force was finally tamed and the rebel leader reduced to the existence of a fugitive.
 
The fort remained until 1883.
 
When back from patrol, saddle sore men dug out baths on the banks of a hot stream where they could relax and lose their aches.

In the late nineteenth century the town was nor much more than a dusty stopover for travellers in the North Island interior.
 
There was hotel accom­modation and spa bathing, bur little more.
 
Taupo was not a developing or prospering rural region: it had few farmers to serve .
 
Yet one of the first Europeans to visit the district, the naturalist Ernst Dieffenbach, glimpsed its potential as early as 1841.
 
Bewitched by 'the scenery of Taupo lake, the whole character of the landscape, the freshness and peculiarity of the vegetation, the white smoke rising around' he saw a beauty 'well calculated to attract visitors from all parts of the world'.
 
Two things have largely conspired to bring Dieffenbach's vision to pass: trout and trust­worthy roads.
 
Brown and then Californian rain­bow trout were introduced to the lake towards the end of the nineteenth century.
 
With little com­petition and an abundance of food the fish grew to phenomenal size.
 
The trout of Taupo, a story in themselves, became legend among the world's anglers.
 
Getting to them, however, was another matter.
 
The main trunk railway between Auckland and Wellington ducked the Taupo district.
 
Storms of dust from the pumice roads suffocated travellers in summer; and deep and sandy mud bogged coaches and cars in winter.
 
Today the road journey to Taupo is comfortable and far less desolate. Farms, forests and timber towns are strung along the route.
 
New Zealand's postwar affluence has confirmed the district's resort character.
 
Summer homes dot the lakeshore, and settlement after settlement has grown. Luxury .motels and hotels have opened their doors, not only to the world's anglers, but also to lovers of summer water sports and to skiers on Ruapehu's slopes to the south in winter.
 
The shore of Taupo, halfway between Auckland and Wellington on Highway I, with warm pools and soft beds for the weary, still makes a logical stopover for the traveler through the North Island interior.
 
For all the change, visitors first glimpsing the lake can still share the astonish­ment and delight felt by the famished and footsore explorers of the nineteenth century when, after days spent travelling through desolate wilderness, they found streamers of steam and a great inland sea brimming to the farthest horizon.

Regional Visitor Information Sites:
 
Kawhia harbour Visitor Information: www.kawhiaharbour.co.nz
Aotea Harbour Visitor Information: www.aoteaharbour.co.nz
Young girls blog about Aotea: www.aotea.ws
Waitomo Visitor Information: www.waitomo.ws 
Waikato Visitor Information: www.waikato.ws
Taranaki Visitor Information: www.taranaki.ws
King Country Visitor Information: www.kingcountry.co.nz
Chatham Islands Visitor Information: www.chathamislands.ws
Queenstown Visitor Information: www.queenstown.ws
New Zealand Cruise Information: www.harbourcruises.co.nz