"Taking the steam launch or boats, the party of five or six - for it is much more pleasant to travel in company - will leave Ohinemutu in the morning, cross the lake to its north-east corner, and enter the Ohau canal, which connects Rotorua and Rotoiti.  The latter is one of the most beautiful of all the lakes in the district.  It is a placid sheet of water, about nine miles long and two broad, broken into several reaches by some long peninsulas that run half-way across the lake and form large sheltered bays.  To the left, as the boat enters from the canal, are two small and almost land-locked coves; but the greatest beauty of the lake is to be found at its eastern end, where the shores are beautifully clothed with bush right to the water's edge in some parts, and in others bold cliffs, festooned with luxuriant vegetation, rise abruptly, throwing their dark shadows over the lake.  The water from Rotoiti finds outlets at different points of the shore.  Some of it leaves the lake by a subterranean channel beneath these cliffs, but the chief outlet is at Tuheke, in the bay at the north-west corner of the lake, where a very respectable stream issues forth in a series of rapids and falls.  On the south side of the lake, not far from Tikitere, there is a very efficacious hot sulphur bath called Manupirua."

Hot Lakes Wonderland

1896