Morere Hot Springs in Hawke’s Bay – Day 268

Today we’re going to be relaxing in some hot pools surrounded by palm trees.

Our northern Hawke’s Bay adventure continues starting from lake Waikaremoana and making our way to Morere. And in true New Zealand fashion the weather turns to poo but luckily in Morere there is a rainy day activity waiting for us.

This reminds we a lot of our Coromandel Tour with Sarni if you remember. I’ve never seen so much rain as the rain I saw that day.

I’m cold and wet. it’s a miserable day. I want to get inside the hot pools relax indulge treat myself, treat yourself, treat everybody.

As we make our way to the Nikau Pools which are the hot pools that we’ve chosen to bathe in today it’s a little bit of a walk to get there through the glorious native bush.

Thankfully, the friendly staff at Morere Hot Springs lent us this huge umbrella for us to make our way through the forest and even more luckily, the hot pools in this part of the complex are completely under the shelter.

Out of the eight pools that the Morere Hot Springs have there is one which is called the cold plunge I’ll let you guess what it is and I’ll let you guess why Laura didn’t want to stay in it for much longer.

Needless to say we are much more comfortable in the true hot pools and there is plenty of them there is eight different ones and all of them have a slightly different temperature. But what is good and what we like about hot pools is the fact that it’s the perfect opportunity to solialise and we meet a lot of other travellers that we actually take the time to chat with.

A lot of people often forget that hot pools are definitely a social experience. you are basically bathing with a bunch of strangers so you should chit chat right? We share our own life and travel experience around New Zealand which is really awesome but what takes our breath away is the surroundings. We are surrounded by beautiful nikau palm trees and a ton of rainforest. It’s absolutely amazing.

But enough relaxing we’ve got a forest to explore.

Alright so the rain finally stopped as soon as we got out of the pools so we’re pretty happy about it and we get to enjoy the lovely walk cos we clearly didn’t enjoy it on the way in.

Morere Hot Springs is not only famous for its hot springs but it’s also a scenic reserve and you can actually access a lot of this reserve via different walking tracks ranging from 25 minutes to 2 hours missions. Because the views are probably not going to look too great today from The Ridge Track, Robin and I decide to take the Nikau Loop Track which is an easy 25 minute walk.

Straight away we realise that this forest is a lot different from any other forest in New Zealand that we’ve been walking through during the last 268 days. it really has this tropical feel with loads of different palm trees around us./ in particular a palm tree called the Nikau palm.

Nikau means no coconuts in Maori but these nikau palms do have these really pretty pink flowers and they form part of a tract of native forest which is the last remaining of its kind on the east coast of New Zealand.

We learn lots about this forest thanks to all the interpretation panels that we find alongside the walk and we also learn more about the spring water that goes into Morere Hot Springs.

For instance, the water here is known as fossilised seawater because it’s travelled for thousands of years before bubbling up to the surface and being used to be pumped into the hot springs.

So just to give you a bit of a scale to this spring. It does look like a really small stream of water at the bottom of the valley but it produces 250,000 litres of water a day which is quite huge and that one of the many facts that we learn on those panels.

Our accommodation for tonight is located at the end of a very very narrow bridge. It’s the Morere Hot Springs Lodge. it’s a really cool place where everybody has their own little cottage and the food here is absolutely delicious, short ribs and fries. Yum!

Tomorrow we are making our way all the way to Gisborne with a quick stop at the Maihia Peninsula where we’re gonna do stuff. I don’t know what.