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This surreal geothermal nature reserve unfurls across the Taupō Volcanic Zone, a landscape sculpted by seventeen millennia of volcanic force into a palette no painter could invent. At its heart lies the Champagne Pool, a steaming emerald-green sinter basin ringed by a vivid orange rim of arsenic and sulphur deposits, its waters perpetually effervescing like liquid gold beneath rising vapour.

Seen from above, the aerial panorama reveals a otherworldly mosaic: burnt siennas bleeding into jade, sulphuric yellows framing craters of bubbling mud, and silica terraces cascading toward the bush-clad hills of Rotorua. Māori regard these waters as sacred, Waiotapu meaning ‘sacred waters’, a place where earth’s molten memory rises to the surface in colour and steam.

Boardwalks wind through this active thermal park past the Devil’s Bath, the Oyster Pool and the punctual Lady Knox Geyser, offering an immersive encounter with one of the planet’s most photogenic and chemically vivid natural phenomena, a landscape both beautiful and faintly menacing.