Thingomy.co.uk

Forgot to mention yesterday that the caves thing was in Waitomo, and i’m currently in Toupo.

Yesterday wasn’t hugely eventfully, I went out to get lunch and a cash machine, while waiting for the cash machine I was standing around a nice square in the middle of the town, and a random Chinese lass came up to me and started of a conversation, I should have known that it wasn’t going to be good seeing as it started with “you have very nice beard and mustashe where you from?” (and no there was no comma in the middle) before I know where I was she had tried to flog me some book about the philosophical background of martial arts, then bloody well tried to guranga me, I told the cow to sod off. So after that rather amusing incident, I went for a walk.

lake Toupo is the largest fresh water body in austrelasia, and was formed in an eruption several thousand years ago. there was another smaller explosion later, in roman times, and they reported that the sky turned red over europe, it has a surface area of 616 square kilometres, so we arn’t speaking a small explosion here…

anyway, the overflow is a river called the Waikato River, which at times has a flow that will fill an olimpic swimming pool in 2 seconds. there is a path that leads along it, and this is where I chose to take a walk.

There is a hot water spring a few K out of town, it forms a stream, and pours into to the river. where the 2 meet, there is an area that one can go swimming in hot water, I decided to investigate this, it actually turned out to be pretty lousy, as there is some hot water pools (note, they are hot, not warm) and a load of cold water. after swilling about there for an hour, getting both bored and sunburnt, I continued along the path up to huka falls.

Think of a fairly low waterfall, a few meters at most, with an olimpic swimming pool going over it every 2 seconds, well, it’s awesome. I stopped for a while and took a load of photos… tech stuff:

I took a panoramic, that turned out be about 8 shots wide by 3 high, I used my 17-70 at about 30mm. Unfortunately I screwed up and left it at 10MP, so used half a memory card. the exposure was crazy as there was direct sunlit white water with subtle green tones in it in the foreground and forest in shadow in the background, along with clouds and blue sky. I decided to exposure bracket it, by a little over 3 stops, taking some in the middle as well. that and the fact the water was moving, means it’s going to be really weird to put together, but if I pull it off it will be really cool.

Tomorrow I go on the “east as” trip, it should be really cool, I’ve been told that it’s the best bit that Kiwi do, so it should be nice (or sweet as, as a kiwi would say). It’s the outback of NZ, I don’t expect to get mobile coverage let alone internet while out there, so see you folks in 4 days. I believe that we sleep on random mouri families floors for much of it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 0340 and is filed under Photography, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.