Rotorua. a.k.a. RotoVegas
Born here and home for 50 of my 59 years.
The (now) famous Mount Ngongotaha in the top left. The island in the middle is a plug of cooled magma.
Lake Rotorua is surrounded by hills that are the rim of a caldera. A volcano that erupted about 220,000 years ago. The city sits inside the rim and enjoys a sulphur smell the locals rarely notice, steam oozing from the ground in various spots. Small earthquakes (they say the earths crust is too thin & soft here for pressure to build so we consider ourselves lucky that pressure is released through small earthquakes rather than large. But I think Christchurch thought they were safe from a big one.) But it's all good because we've got no snakes or animals trying to kill us!
NZ's most popular tourist destination with around 3.5 million visitors a year (pop. 70,000). Plenty of hotels & restaurants etc. 3 hotels currently being used as isolation (that's iso for your Aussies!) facilities for arrivals to the country. The attractions are geothermal (geysers etc), Maori culture, lakes, mountain biking & a lot of other man made activities designed to extract the tourist $.
When covid hit we thought the city would be stuffed without international visitors who make up about half the 3.5m. But it turns out that when Kiwi's can't fly - they drive to Rotorua for breaks. So it's going quite well.
Part of the city, taken from the south looking north. Apologies for the image size. I think it might be quite large.
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Lake Tarawera, one of my favourite lakes for boating and trout fishing. A 20 minute drive away. Mount Tarawera erupted big time in 1886 killing over a hundred that lived nearby. In one part (imaginatively named hot water beach in true NZ style) you can catch a trout on one side of the boat and cook it on the other in very hot water emerging from the shore.

I get my summer motorsport fix at Paradise Valley Speedway on the edge of town.

Everyone's here to see Superstocks. A full contact class where the aim is just as much to finish first as it is to stop others finishing first. The local team (who last year changed their flag from the confederate flag to a new home grown design) were crowned team champions at the last Palmerston North teams champs. An event rated more highly than the NZ teams champs. Teams racing is considered the pinnacle of stockcar racing and is something to behold.

An hour or so north to beautiful Pacific Ocean beaches. No Crocs or stingers. Maybe a few sharks.

2 hours south to Ski Fields on an active volcano
it usually looks like this.

Occasionally it looks like this
