My cruise ship shore excursion to an active volcano on White Island off the north coast of New Zealand in 2013 was the strangest and most exciting tour of my life. It never was a trip for the queasy or careful.
(This report was updated on December 8, 2019, after the volcano exploded on White Island. My guide from 2013, Hayden Marshall-Inman, was killed.)
At least one American expert on volcanic activity told me that White Island was highly dangerous. Maybe that’s why some cruise passengers chose to remain above the island, booking a flight-seeing tour offered by several ships.
The report that follows was not a recommendation to fly above or to board a boat to the island on a tour from Whakatane, near New Zealand’s port of Tauranga.
It was written as a tale from a traveler who made the questionable sea journey.
White Island, formed by volcanic eruptions, is a world of gaseous steam and serious acid, where the ground shakes from the Ring of Fire that burns below the rim of the basin of the Pacific Ocean.
Sauntering through a bubbling minefield
Though 15,000 to 20,000 people arrive at White Island by boat each year, at first, when I stepped off a skiff onto the island, I felt foolish, wondering why a rational person would choose to saunter through a bubbling minefield that could explode at any time.
Then, I felt the exhilaration shared by volcano explorers through the centuries, being the rare witnesses to the natural power and fury that usually hides from our view beneath the surface of the Earth. Besides, my will was up to date.
The island is like no other tourist attraction. Handrails and fences do not exist. Travelers don gas masks and hardhats for guided tours of more than an hour over rugged terrain where no one takes a step without asking whether it is safe to move forward, back, left or right.
“You could walk into a hole in the earth,” said my guide, Hayden Marshall-Inman, “and be steamed to death while the acid stripped your hide to the bone.”
Our group of about a dozen kept close to the guide.
From the moment we slid out of a skiff onto a small dock, Hayden had our full attention, though most injuries on White Island, he said, are sprained ankles. Travelers are captivated by picture opportunities, he said, and miss the loose rocks that litter the unmarked and unrecognizable trails.
A bright blue sky provided the backdrop for a landscape of craggy, corroded ridges of scorched earth, porous rock with yellow streaks of sulfur, and chimneys of sulfur crust rising from an unstable floor, waiting for the next rain to force them to collapse.
At the bottom of slopes around us, white blasts of steam billowed from hidden holes. Closer to the steam, we grabbed our gas masks so we could breathe without a burn from water vapor mixed with carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and who knows what else. We sucked on hard candy to reduce the urge to cough.
Guide Hayden led us to the edge of a lake bubbling with acid. “It’s as active as you’ll get,” said Hayden. “Step where you are told not to, and you could be disfigured for life — if we could pull you back to safety.”
Earthquakes shake the island most days, and occasionally are so strong that the tour boat from the mainland turns around and heads back to port. A travel writing colleague, who twice has journeyed half way around the world from the United States with a plan to see White Island, has yet to get there; twice the last leg of the trip was canceled due to weather or island activity.
A danger for travelers, says volcano expert
Erik Klemetti, an assistant professor of Geosciences at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, is the volcano expert who worries about the potential dangers to travelers at White Island.
“I have trouble with White Island as a tourist activity,” said Klemetti, during an interview in 2013. “It’s not an amusement park attraction. It’s a gaping hole in the surface of the earth that could explode catastrophically and unexpectedly.”
Klemetti provides glimpses from a webcam on White Island on his blog, www.wired.com/wiredscience/eruptions. He filed a video of a White Island night explosion on Oct. 14, 2013.
If you choose to go on a boat tour, either from a cruise ship or on your own, be aware that the voyage from the mainland may be rough and rolling. On my tour, guides recommended pills to ward off seasickness, and seaman handed out bags for the ill on both legs of the two-hour ride.
Afterward, plan for an evening of recuperation and easy breathing.
Information on White Island tours
Pee Jay’s White Island Tour, the only New Zealand company with a license for visiting the island, has been leaving daily from Whaketane (Whiteisland.co.nz). Most people on the tour come from the cruise ship port at Tauranga or the popular tourist town of Rotorua, each an hour or more away by bus.
I carried a set of clothes — pants, shirt, jacket, socks — that never left New Zealand. I tossed them, full of chemicals, in the trash after the tour.
With about two hours at the island and four hours on the boat rides, a trip to White Island can be an exhausting day. If you are off a cruise ship, make certain you have time enough to get back. In January 2014, the Seabourn Odyssey offers a flightseeing excursion to White Island during a 16-night cruise from Auckland to Sydney. Some smaller cruise ships anchor off White Island, including the Caledonian Sky, Oceanic Discoverer, Europa, Bremen, and Hanseatic.
David Molyneaux writes regularly about cruising news, tips and trends at TravelMavenBlog.com. His cruise trends column appears monthly in U.S. newspapers and on other Internet sites. He is editor of TheTravelMavens.com.
This article appeared originally in the Miami Herald
