Drove south for the day with no real plan, just a few stops we had been meaning to get to for ages. The kind of day where you actually follow through and it turns out to be worth the early start.
Tirau
Tirau is a small town on State Highway 1 that you would drive straight through without registering, except someone has put giant corrugated iron animals on the main road. There is a ram with enormous curved horns staring at you from the footpath and a sheep next to it, both made of corrugated iron and much larger than any photo suggests.
We pulled over and looked at them for a bit. Ten minutes, back in the car. But the kind of thing you think about for the rest of the drive.
Te Waihou Blue Spring
This one has a lot of Instagram presence and the photos always look like someone cranked the saturation up to about 180. The water in those shots is almost neon. People are definitely editing it.
The real thing is less dramatic and more surprising. The colour in person is a faint blue-green that shifts with the light and the angle, not the electric blue you see online. What it actually has, which no one really prepares you for, is the clarity. The water is cold and spring-fed, filtering up through the ground over years before it surfaces here with almost nothing in it by the time it arrives. You look at it and your brain tries to figure out how deep it is and keeps coming up blank because you can see the bottom too clearly.
There is a fallen log sitting on the streambed at one point that looks like it is suspended in air. That is how clear it is.
The walk is flat and easy, through farmland and some native bush, and you spend most of it just looking at the water. Near the outlet it picks up speed and turns white and pale blue, which is closer to the Instagram version. That part needs no editing.
Huka Falls
Ended at Huka Falls, which gets a lot of visitors and turns out to have earned all of them.
The Waikato River is a proper large river, and then it gets squeezed into a gorge about 15 metres wide with nowhere to go but fast and loud over the falls. The result looks less like a natural river and more like someone let off a fire hose in a canyon. The colour is this deep blue-green that your eyes do not quite believe. It is not a trick — just what very clean, fast-moving water looks like when the sediment is gone. It absorbs red light and scatters blue, and all the turbulence adds fine bubbles that bounce the light around further. Physics being unusually cooperative.
There were a lot of people on the viewing bridge. It did not matter. The falls are loud enough that the crowd fades out and you just stand there watching the water until someone nudges you to move along.
Good day.