An Adventure #2 – The Boiling Seas

The geography of Middle-Earth New Zealand continues to surprise me. We have left Hobbiton behind and travelled across many strange landscapes. It’s all geothermal out here: sulphurous air and strange rocks and bright waters. Among other beautiful wildernesses we walked a bit of the Tongariro National Park, which contains the mighty Mount Ngauruhoe – or Mount Doom, if you’re a nerd – and while we didn’t get all the way up there we did come across a very beautiful waterfall on our travels, around which I of course scrambled like a goblin.

All the bubbling geothermal springs were giving me ideas, of course – ideas for my own little stretch of fictional hot water. The waters out in the parks roil and churn exactly as I’d imagined the Boiling Seas, though without the… particular scent of all that sulphur. (There are plenty of minerals in the Seas but I’ve always thought of them as smelling a bit more pleasant.) I took a lot of reference photos – including a couple that I reckon will probably make good future covers, with a bit of editing and the addition of some tiny boats. If nothing else, just seeing real steam rolling off these ponds was amazing.

Just look at this lovely scaled-down shoreline. This is exactly how it looks in my head.

But all the scintillating pools in the world didn’t prepare me for what we found on the shores of Lake Taupō one evening, settling down to watch the sunset.

A hot beach. A beach with hot water. Steaming, scalding-hot water. A Boiling Sea.

I HAVE FOUND THE BOILING SEASalright, it's a lake not a seaalright, it's 'very hot' not boiling But there is STEAM coming off that water and it is too hot to touch for long and it'll *do*, damnitDidn't think I'd ever see anything like what I wrote for real. Pretty special.

— Hûw Steer – Author (@huwage.bsky.social) 2025-03-26T07:34:01.412Z

Look at that steam!

…ok, it’s a lake, not a sea, albeit a very large one. Ok, it’s not actually boiling (though it is very hot, to the point of warning signs and the inability to stick your feet in for longer than a couple of seconds). But the ‘Uncomfortably Hot Lake’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, now, does it?

It’s nowhere near as visually impressive as the smaller geothermal pools. But it’s real, in a way I never thought I’d ever see as long as I lived. There is steam coming off those lapping little waves, steam from volcanic geothermal heat deep below the water – and who knows what’s down there? – actual scalding waves to hide what lies beneath. I have touched them. It hurt. But it was real.

Steam doesn’t show up well on a phone camera. It’s there. Trust me.

I wrote this world of mine as a whim. I wrote it knowing about geothermal springs, sure, but knowing of them on a small scale, at most a big pond or a small river. Lake Taupō is almost 250 square miles. It might be freshwater but it is a small sea, in essence. I never dreamed that something so large existed, was even possible. It even works in roughly the same way I wrote – old volcanic activity and hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the lakebed, spewing out minerals and heat, not on the same scale as my own fantasy but not far off.

I didn’t expect this. I knew that New Zealand would let me walk in the world of Tolkien, as it continues to do even as we draw towards the end of our journey in Wellington. I did not expect it to bring me, just for a moment, to my own world. A place I thought it would be literally impossible to ever see or experience, even really get close to. A place I thought lived solely in my own head or on my pages.

But I have now paddled in the Boiling Seas. And I wonder, now, what else is out there in the real world that I thought was impossible.