in Taupo

We're a few hours further away from Wellington in the tourist hub of Taupo. We start by driving about 10 miles north of town to the Craters of the Moon, a thermal area of steam vents (which eventually collapse, causing it's namesake look) and mud pools.
It's similar to the walks around Yellowstone, except here the ground between the steam and the pools is covered in small, hardy plants. In Yellowstone the thermal areas' ground is, well, yellow stone, along with white and faint brown, barren from the heat, minerals and nature of the steaming water. I think the relative youth of New Zealand's thermal area is the difference, but that's just a guess.
We drove back on a road that may as well have been called tourist lane - every couple of hundred yards there was another shop hoping for business. We decided to give some of ours to the Prawn (shrimp) Farm's restaurant and gift shop, as well as the Honey Hive's mead tasting, and obviously, honey.
The afternoon was a three-hour cruise on a sailboat once owned by Errol Flynn around Lake Taupo, once the site of huge volcanic explosion and supposedly the largest crater lake in the Southern Hemisphere.
The main destination of interest on the sail were some huge rock carvings done by local Maori in the late 1970s. The main interesting sight the rest of the time were the people falling out of airplanes. Taupo is the cheapest place to skydive in New Zealand, and probably the cheapest place in the world you'd want to skydive. I assume the price drops because they don't really have to worry about litigation under the country's laws, and because they do more volume than anywhere, and because it's one of the main selling points. For whatever reason, on a clear day like this, you can occasionally spot the people leaving the plane for the free fall, and you can easily see the colored parachutes drifting down, usually 10 or more in the sky at once, with waves of jumpers coming every 20-30 minutes.
We end the sight-seeing with a trip to Huka Falls. It's not a tall waterfall, may 15-20 feet, but there is a high volume of water falling at high speed, causing the quarter-mile or so of river below the falls to churn and look like a blue, cool, larger version of the brown, boiling mudpots we saw to start the day.
(Then into town for another quiz night. And, of course, a second-place finish.)