Holiday pics: Aratiatia Rapids

[vilakins]

The Aratiatia Dam lets water flow for about 15 minutes every two hours during the day, turning a rocky chasm into impressive rapids. We liked this so much, we watched it three times. Unfortunately, I let Greg take most of the pictures, and he did almost all close-ups "because ones of the whole thing didn't look very impressive in the viewfinder". Well, no. It's a small viewfinder. He took over 50 and hardly any of them are any good. Sigh.

Therefore these are a mix of some I took earlier in the week and the best ones Greg took.


Aratiatia Rapids before and after.


Aratiatia Rapids still filling up


The dam and the bridge you can also watch from, pre rapids


It's mostly rocks.before the let the water go


At full flow


Dam and rapids at full flow


Looking straight down. One of Greg's many close-ups, but I like the colours in this one. You can see the bubbles that give the very clear water its turquoise colour as it reflects the sky.

Comments

[vandonovan.livejournal.com]

Wow, the undammed pictures verses the dammed one is really incredible. Why do they dam it up like that? The colors are really vibrant.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

They dam it for hydroelectric power, the main source of our electricity. They had a deal though, that they had to let the rapids run several times a day as they used to.

[vandonovan.livejournal.com]

Aaaah, that makes sense. But it looks beautiful running so I'm glad they let it free.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Gorgeous colours!

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

The water's an amazing colour there.

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

That is seriously wooshy water.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

And I've done white-water rafting in similar water. :-)

[san-valentine.livejournal.com]

So pretty - and the before and after pictures really tell the story.

The dam itself looks like the sort of thing they used as locations in Blakes 7. The surroundings are far too pretty though. They didn't often go to pretty worlds.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

No, just the Bounty one and Sarran, which was full of barbarians. They stood out in my memory from when I was a kid because they were different.

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

This is really beautiful,how can water change the landscape, and the colours are so bright!

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Really? I thought the pictures were a bit dark because it was cloudy those days.

The water makes a huge difference! :-)