The Town
Taupo sits on the edge of Lake Taupo — New Zealand's largest lake, with a surface area of 616 km² that matches roughly the entire land area of Singapore. The lake is no ordinary body of water: it sits inside a supervolcanic caldera formed by the Oruanui eruption around 25,600 years ago, which was the largest eruption on Earth in the past 70,000 years. The eruption ejected 1,170 cubic kilometres of material and collapsed the land beneath it. That crater then filled slowly with water to become what you see today — a lake the colour of slate and the size of an inland sea, with Mt Tongariro and Ngāuruhoe rising from its southern shore.
The town itself is pleasant without being exceptional, but its location is everything. Taupo is also one of the world's premier skydiving destinations — from 15,000 ft on a clear day you can see both coasts of New Zealand simultaneously, with the lake and the Tongariro volcanoes spread out directly below. Most people spend 1–2 days here, often timing the visit around the Tongariro Crossing an hour's drive away.
Lake Taupo Sunset Cruise
The sunset cruise on Lake Taupo is one of those activities that sounds slightly touristy on paper and turns out to be genuinely memorable. The boat heads out across the lake to Mine Bay — a rocky alcove accessible only by water — where a set of Māori rock carvings rise 14 metres above the waterline from the cliff face. The carvings were created between 1976 and 1980 by master carver Matahi Whakataka-Brightwell, commissioned by his grandmother to honour their ancestor Ngātoroirangi, the legendary navigator who guided the Māori tribes of Tūwharetoa and Te Arawa to this region more than a thousand years ago. The style is traditional, the scale enormous, and the setting — accessed only by water, appearing around a rocky headland — gives the whole experience a genuinely Indiana Jones quality.
The boat stops in the golden hour light with the carvings lit by the last sun hitting the cliff. Then someone jumped off the roof of the boat into the lake, which is absolutely freezing, and then more people did it until it became an event. One of our group drank jungle juice from a box on the way out and got spectacularly seasick on the way back. Highly recommended regardless.
The Famous Taupo McDonald's
This requires no justification. Taupo has a McDonald's built inside a Douglas DC-3 propeller plane — a 1943-built WWII military transport that made its final flight in October 1984, spent years at a car dealership, and became a McDonald's when the franchise took over the site in 1990. You order at the counter, walk through the fuselage, and eat your burger in a passenger seat with the original overhead luggage racks and circular porthole windows, the cockpit visible through a glass screen at the front. The plane seats 20 diners and sits directly on State Highway 1 through town — impossible to miss. It is absolutely unhinged and absolutely worth visiting. Go once. Take photos.
Driving Range Over the Lake
The Taupo Golf Club runs a driving range with a floating target platform anchored out on the lake. Hit the platform and you win NZD $10,000. No one we met had ever seen it happen, and you probably won't either. The range itself charges by the bucket of balls, and the combination of trying to hit a target on water while looking at the volcanic peaks of the Tongariro range in the distance is a genuinely good way to spend an afternoon.
The Tongariro Crossing
Taupo is the main base for the Tongariro Alpine Crossing — New Zealand's most famous day hike and, by most measures, the best single day walk in the country. The trailhead is about an hour's drive from town. Shuttle operators depart from Taupo in the early morning and return you from the far end of the one-way track, so no car is needed. The crossing passes through five completely different volcanic landscapes in a single day — from flat white shrubland to black lava fields, orange clay, the crater rim at 1,886 m, and down past the brilliant Emerald Lakes surrounded by geothermal vents. Read the full guide here.