Out on the Lakes.

When the visitor has seen something of the hot-spring pitted lake shores, and has watched Pohutu spout its forty or sixty or seventy feet into the air, a pulsing diamonded rainbow shaft of living white against the blue of heaven, and has gazed into porridge-pots and fumaroles, puia and ngawha without end, he will want to see something of the Lakes. And after all, to my mind, the water cruises are the greatest joy the geyser country has to offer. Here the traveller may combine trout-fishing with his boating and camping in a fashion altogether delightful. The canal-like little river, the Ohau, which connects the lakes of Rotorua and Roto-iti, is useful beyond price, because it permits the sailing boat or motor launch to pass through and extend the cruise twenty miles from Rotorua town. Rotorua's shores hold many excellent camping places, where the fisherman may moor his launch and pitch his tent, away from the disturbing crowd, and away from the disturbing crowd, and the Ohau itself, just where it comes eddying out of Rotorua, is another favourite fishing place, where houseboats are seen moored to the willow banks in summer time. The angler in such spots need not go far for fish. The superior merits of Taupo's or Waikato's big fighting fish have been extolled by overseas visiting sportsmen, but these quiet waters of the Rotorua twin lakes, and Tarawera and other near-by lakes, furnish sport enough and to spare for the average angler, and even the trawling despised by the expert fly-fishermen holds plenty of excitement. The launch, slowed to half-speed, patrols the grounds just beyond the mouths of the hill streams—the best fishing places—and the angler with a bright minnow on his line, stands expectantly in the stern, until the tug comes, and then the joyful cry of “Fish!” is raised. The launch is stopped, and angler and rainbow trout tussle for mastery. Sometimes salmo iridens comes off best, and streaks indignantly up into his home stream with sundry fathoms of line hanging from his strong jaws.

Trout fishing is only one of the interests which this soft blue lake holds for one. There is lovely old Mokoia, a green mountain rising from the middle of the lake.

“An island like a little book Full of a hundred tales.”

There are old-time villages around the mainland shores, each with its carved meeting-house. There is Hamurana of the crystal fount; you can reach it by car, too, and combine the trip with a visit to that most marvellous of trout pools, the Fairy Spring, Te Puna - a - Tuhoe of Maori legend.