By JO-MARIE BROWN
The mud pools, the geysers, the hot pools ... and now the golden beach.
The temporary beach, near the Rotorua lakefront, is the latest addition to the tourist city's attractions.
The beach is made up of 450 tonnes of Bay of Plenty sand, brought in for 100 beach
volleyballers competing in the More FM Beach Volleyball Pro-Tour, which starts today.
Twenty truckloads of Maketu's finest white sand have transformed a grassy reserve in preparation for the tournament.
Organiser Neil Purdon says Rotorua and the tour's previous stopover, Taupo, may not seem like logical venues for beach volleyball but the sport is taking off nationwide.
"We're an outdoor country and, as a result, beach volleyball appeals to the New Zealand psyche."
Crowds of up to 10,000 are expected to watch the men's and women's competitions over the next two days.
Organisers hope to feature teams from Australia, Switzerland, Brazil and Canada, but some players are not due to arrive in New Zealand until today.
The tour will head to Mt Maunganui on Saturday and to Auckland the following weekend for the final round and the NZ Open competition.
Any thoughts locals may have had yesterday of building sandcastles on their new attraction were soon dispelled when a front-end loader, a tractor and the tour's operations crew armed with rakes set out to flatten the 70m-long "beach".
"It's just like icing a cake," said the operations manager, known only as Cowboy.
Sprinklers were used to dampen the surface and make sure none of the sand escaped into nearby motels or Lake Rotorua.
"When they play on it it always ends up being hashed up anyway but we rake over it to try and make it as even as possible for both sides," Cowboy said.
Four courts were mapped out ready for action today but anyone thinking of spreading out a beach towel when the competition finishes will be out of luck.
The golden stretch will disappear as quickly as it arrived, with local builders expected to buy what's left.
