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Ever since my metaphoric disposal of a generic holiday town, I have to confess I have been beset with guilt. Did I succumb to the trap of judging without sufficient knowledge; judging without hearing the rebuttal; being trapped in a net of my own making? I suspect I may have been guilty of that not only with Taupo but also its calderic lake which merely hosts it as a port.

Sometimes, though, to resolve a problem, to settle an issue satisfactorily, you have to think outside the box -or go around the box, as it were. So I did: I drove all the way around the lake. Well, it was something to do rather than walk the sidewalks with the crowds and souvenir-shop. Okay, I did buy a pair of Merino socks on sale, but that was yesterday, and I am now trying to absolve myself of guilt, okay?

But the lake… I will admit that it is an impressively large lake for a little country like New Zealand, and the circumferential roads, on which there seemed to be an inordinate number of promising leads, did little to assuage my guilt, because the signage did not seem to care about dead ends. I must confess that I am a sucker for dead ends, because you never know whether there might be a surprise at the end. Or at least a store selling water.

Full of twists and turns, hills and dales, not to mention the hordes of impatient locals upset with my adherence to the posted speed limits, I was tired by the time I got half way around the lake. Of course, it didn’t auger well that I got lost twice and even had to retrace my route once (which I don’t count as being ‘lost’ really). Mind you I was using the motel facsimile of a tourist map of the area; motels don’t expect the average tourist to stray far, so in deference to the ancient maps of the world with their ‘Here be dragons’ written in wherever knowledge of the area was scant, I suppose I shouldn’t be upset if any of the un-streeted areas outside of town limits are a bit sketchy.

Interestingly -if a bit off colour- I pulled over in a clearing that seemed to mark the beginning of a gravelly road. My back was getting sore from sitting behind the wheel and I wanted to stretch my legs, so I got out and walked around the car. Just then, a farmer’s truck pulled out of a long well-treed driveway and, after closing his gate and shaking his head disapprovingly, pointed to a hand-printed sign on a tree at the edge of his property. ‘This is where the school bus stops,’ it said, and then, in bright red letters -also in the local italic script- added ‘It is not a urinal stop’.

It’s amazing how even thinking about something like that makes it a categorical imperative (I’ve always wanted to use that Kantian ethical statement without its imprisoning philosophical ramifications.) I’m old, eh? Nevertheless, in an attempt at moral obedience, I climbed back in my car, and shelved the idea until the MacDonald’s in Taupo would again facilitate my urges.

But I digress. While I still find many arguments against bald, and unfettered Tauponism, I now realize I should be judging it by more expansive criteria: to wit, the box however unwrapped, in which it finds itself. Perhaps Taupo can only exist with an adjective: like red, or maybe busy; perhaps it cannot easily exist as an undescribed noun -like, say, ‘a town’. We all need attributes; girl tells us little about the person she is; we are far more informed about her if there are several adjectives that describe her: intelligent, tall, a doctor, or, of course beautiful.

Taupo is a town, for sure, but it is a noun better accompanied by adjectives -as, say, a busy tourist town on the edge of a magnificent freshwater lake in the middle of a forest; a town that appeals to many different tastes; a town that attracts the best and worst of us: Humanity writ large.

Maybe thus parsed, I may yet find myself visiting again, inshallah…