Waikato River

The Waikato, New Zealand's longest river (425km), rises as the Tongariro River on the snow-capped Mount Ruapehu (2787m) volcano in Tongariro National Park, flows through Lake Taupo and emerges from it as the Waikato River at Taupo. The Maori name Waikato-taniwha-rau means 'the flowing water of the hundred water monsters'. Before the river was tamed by dams, power stations and flood barriers in the 20th C., it fully justified its name with its waterfalls, whirlpools, rapids, marshy areas and floods.

At Mercer, north of Huntly, the Waikato abruptly turns west and flows into the Tasman Sea in a wide estuary, over black ferruginous sand. Until the last great eruption of Mount Taupo in the 2nd C. AD the Waikato flowed not westward, as it does now, but east into the Firth of Thames.