I realised the other day that I have surprisingly few photos of the place I grew up – Rotorua. It’s one of the tourist hotspots of the North Island, and yet I’ve never really photographed much there. Apart from the Redwoods. And at Wingspan. But what makes Rotorua is the geothermal activity – our writhing mud-pools, vaporous streams, and the milk-white water of Sulphur point. It’s a direct link to the volcanic origin of the crater we call home.

With that in mind, I was up early on my last day home to wander around Kuirau Park. When the air is chill in winter, the mist from the hot pools billows high in the air, obscuring everything but a few steps in front of you. It’s very surreal. Walking around the main pool, shrouded entirely in thick white fog, it’s easy to forget that there’s a main road and the hospital nearby. Everything vanishes. It’s quiet, and eerie.

A boardwalk crosses the pool. It’s a bridge that vanishes into nothingness, the bare arms of dead trees slipping in and out of view. From a distance, they’re nothing but silhouettes in the mist. Up close, they’re a mottled mix of bone white, charred black, and crusted with startling orange lichen. It’s a fun place to photograph, full of graphic compositions that change as the clouds of sulphurous steam shift across the pool. Every now and then light breaks through as the steam boils away, revealing a clear winter morning beyond.

Heading back to the car, we find clusters of all sorts of fungi in the mossy ground. I’m always surprised by just how much there is growing around these geothermal hotspots. As always, life finds a way.