Great Expectations

I make it a general rule to try to keep expectations low; if you expect something to be the best experience of your life and it’s merely great then you’re inevitably disappointed, whereas if you expect something to be good and it’s great then you’re pleasantly surprised. However, somehow, somewhere, I had gotten it into my head that New Zealand’s geothermal features rivaled Yellowstone. I’m not sure how that happened, but when I initially circled Rotorua as a must-visit place on the itinerary I figured I’d be walking through the Southern Hemisphere’s version of Norris Geyser Basin and taking shots of the Kiwi Grand Prismatic Hot Spring. Orakei Korako Geothermal Park is generally listed as the best of the area’s geothermal parks, and I enjoyed getting to visit everything from silica terraces to mud pots, but it would have been one of those places that most people passed by without stopping on their way to see Old Faithful in Yellowstone. I also took a walk around town and saw some of the steam vents along Lake Rotorua, but again, with expectations set to Yellowstone levels, a few steaming pools were neat to see but not what I had been anticipating.

So thus it was that I headed to my lodging for the evening, thinking that this would go down as one of the merely “OK” days of the trip. After checking in the lady who runs the place mentioned that there’s a treewalk with nighttime illumination in the nearby redwood forest (quick history: 150 years ago New Zealanders planted thousands of trees of different species, including a large redwood forest, to see what might grow well and support a timber industry). California is where redwoods are native, and they are much older and larger at home than the ones here, so I was lukewarm to the idea of an after-dark treewalk, but my primary mission over this three month trip is to have adventures and see beautiful things, and you can’t do that from a hotel room, so just after sunset I walked a kilometer to the forest, handed them a ticket, and ascended 30 feet into the trees.

It was amazeballs.

Proving again that expectations can make or break an experience, I spent two hours enjoying 800 meters of bridges and platforms suspended from redwoods, all of them 10-20 meters above the ground. Huge lanterns hung from branches to provide soft illumination in the treetops, LED lights lit up ferns on the ground, lasers made corners of the forest look like they were filled by ten thousand fireflies, and other effects made a redwood forest feel like a perfect blending of art and nature. The bridges and platforms shook with each step and provided a unique perspective on the trees. What might have otherwise been a lackluster day ended on a high note, and I got an experience unlike anything I’ve done before.

Tomorrow I’m thinking of visiting another geothermal park, this time with very low expectations, and beyond that we’ll see what other surprises New Zealand manages to serve up.