Geothermal & Hot Pools
The Taupō Volcanic Zone: geysers, mud pools and water you can sit in.
A rift running from Mount Ruapehu to White Island — the Taupō Volcanic Zone — sits above one of the most productive geothermal systems on the planet. It powers a meaningful share of the national grid and produces the geysers, silica terraces and mud pools that make the central North Island look like nowhere else.
The showpiece parks
Wai-O-Tapu near Rotorua is the most visually extreme: the Champagne Pool at 74°C with its orange arsenic-and-antimony rim, the acid-green Devil's Bath, and terraces of silica in yellow and white. The Lady Knox Geyser is set off with soap at 10:15 each morning.
Te Puia holds Pōhutu, the largest active geyser in the southern hemisphere, erupting up to 30 metres once or twice an hour without any prompting.
Waimangu is the world's youngest geothermal system, created outright by the 1886 Tarawera eruption, and is a walking valley rather than a boardwalk loop. Orakei Korako, less visited, has the largest silica terraces left in the country after the Pink and White Terraces were destroyed.
Water you can get into
Polynesian Spa in Rotorua draws from two springs — one acidic and one alkaline — into a set of lake-edge pools graded by temperature. Hell's Gate offers geothermal mud bathing.
Hanmer Springs in Canterbury and Tekapo Springs in the Mackenzie are developed thermal complexes. Hot Water Beach on the Coromandel is the free version: dig your own pool in the sand within two hours either side of low tide and let it fill with hot water from below.
Kuirau Park in central Rotorua has free public foot pools, open at all hours.
Take the warnings seriously
Thermal ground is genuinely dangerous. The crust over a mud pool can be centimetres thick, and people have been badly burned and killed stepping off marked paths.
Do not put your head under in natural hot pools: Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba present in some untreated geothermal water, causes a rare but almost always fatal infection through the nose. Commercial pools are treated and monitored.
Header photograph by Beast from the Bush via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY / CC BY-SA.