The Gate of Geyserland.

Some scenes pall by familiarity, but the sight of Rotorua, spread out below, as the train emerges from the bush on the Mamaku hills, always comes as a dramatic picture with a quality of surprise, no matter how often one has visited the lakes and the hot springs. Many years of close acquaintance with the Geyser Country have not dulled to me, at any rate, the keen enjoyment of the descent into the charmed region of the Wai-ariki. There are great changes in the environs of Rotorua lake since first one saw it, in the year the railway was completed, very nearly forty years ago. The manuka that clothed with grey the flats and slopes has been swept away; farms and orchards and gardens and groves of trees have taken the place of the uniform blanket of scrub. Rotorua town has grown into the proportions of a small city, this metropolis of Hot Springland. There is a wonderful growth of trees; the handsome plantation bordering the railway station is an example. The page 27 Spa and its furnishings are quite down-to-date, and the healing properties of the hot mineral waters are as great as ever. Nature's medicine never fails. As to accommodation, there are, besides the four large hotels, some thirty boardinghouses, and hard to please indeed would be the traveller who could make complaint on that score.

The town and the Government gardens, the tree-shaded wide streets, the Pukeroa hill park—Maori fortress of old-time—overlooking the blue lake, the hot springpitted foreshore of Ohinemutu, the Maori

“A garden of luxuriant blossoms filling the air with fragrance.”—Longfellow.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
Government Spa buildings and grounds, Rotorua.

homes along the pumice beach, the Maori artistry in wood carving and decorative architecture, all compose into a scene totally different from any other town in New Zealand. It is a place of unending interest and novelty, even if one does not stray far from the wide-spaced town itself. The playing-greens among their beds of flowers, the ferntree-bordered lakelets, the ever-playing little geysers, the Spa buildings with their warm bathing waters so delicious to the skin, make the Government grounds a perpetual pleasuring place for the visitor who likes an easy-going holiday.

For the more energetic there is a vast territory of strange sights spread out for exploration, and there are some of the most beautiful lakes in New Zealand in the great chain of watersheets, lakes of all contours and colours, most of them in a sylvan setting; lakes of story and legend and song; lakes hot and cold, lakes overpeered by wooded heights of every shade of green, lakes dominated ominously by scarred old volcanoes. Close at hand is the famous geyser valley of Whakarewarewa, where Pohutu and Waikite and Waikorohihi throw into the air their rainbow-lit fountains of boiling water and sparkling spray.

Further afield there is the marvellous day's round of Tarawera, Rotomahana and Waimangu, a land-and-water cruise taking one through the hotly-throbbing heart of Geyserland.

Southward again lies the great lake of Taupo; south-eastward the Kaingaroa Plains with its quickly-growing new forest of exotic pines, and beyond again the blue sierras of the Urewera Country.