This, believe it or not, was a road before the flood. You can see it, right in the middle, and then curving away to the left, but it's seen better days. You can also see quite a lot of driftwood, which looks small in the picture, but those pieces in the lower right corner are about as tall as I am.
I thought this was quite amazing - if you cover up the left side of the picture, it looks like hard, parched desert, but then there's the beautiful green NZ grass (and the water). All the silt from the water has settled and covered the grass, and don't be fooled by how dry it looks - I almost lost my shoes to the thick, gooey mud!
Just for comparison's sake, this is a picture I took two weeks ago of that same area, just a bit further down the path. (Yes, there was a path there, although you can't see it at all in the post-flood picture, because it's covered in mud.)
This is the high water line. Some places it was just over the river bank, some places (like here), it was just short of the street, and then some places I couldn't see one, because the water kept going out of the park.
There were fire trucks all up and down Taupo Quay, using their pumps and hoses to get the water back into the river.
This is part of the park, still under about 3 ft of water. It is separated from the river by a bit of higher ground (you can see it in the back of the picture), so now the water is stuck. They are working to pump it out.
This, obviously, is the go-cart track!
And this is the mini-golf course (with the go-cart track behind the trees). Again, the ridge between these areas and the river is now holding the water in, so they have to pump it out. These businesses will have a lot of cleaning to do.
This is the view from one of the bridges, showing how high the water still is. I hope that it doesn't rain for a while now, and it can get back to normal.
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