In Rotorua

Rotorua is noted for its volcanic activity. The city has a large lake and lots of tourists; it has oodles of fee-to-see-it Maori cultural experiences, and one can also zorb, bungy jump, mountain bike and do other vigorous things.

With these possibilities to inspire us, we got up and walked into town to eat. We found an organic restaurant called “NBs.” It was their first morning open and we got super attention and delicious food. I had French toast, which bore little resemblance to what I had experienced under that label before. It included fried, caramelized banana, and was yummy.

We walked back to our motel and drove up into the hills to partake of one of the nearby volcanic and Maori cultural experiences. Our map showed a large area that was marked both “Whakarewarewa” and “Te Puia.” We turned into Whakarewarewa since it came first. Whakarewarewa turned out to be a small Maori village located among the hot springs. The area was used by Maori before European contact, and has been continuously occupied since at least 1904, when a tiny Catholic church was built there.

The Maori in this place now live in small European style houses, but we saw an example of the kinds of houses that the Maori used to use in this area. They were very small, low roofed, and built from the trunks of tree ferns. Our guide said that the tree fern trunks have insulating properties, and that several people survived in them for ten days when they were buried in ash and mud after an eruption late last century.

Most of the village cooking is done by putting food into steam vents, or by lowering it into the hot water pools. It's supposed to be tasty, but doesn't always sit well with everyone.

There are a number of pools with different temperatures that the residents use for different purposes. The community also has built rectangular cement bath tubs; water is diverted into them from one of the hot natural pools and allowed to cool to tolerable levels in time for evening baths.

We saw a delightful show with traditional dances and singing. The leader was a short, attractive Maori woman of indeterminate age who spoke quite articulately with what seemed, to my ear, to be an English storekeeper’s accent. The others in the troupe were interesting, but she was a delight; full of energy and personality, with a good voice and good dancing and poi skills.
Most of the audience was children from a nearby city. At the end of the normal performance they all got on stage and sang and danced a Maori song. It was really fun to watch. Kids singing are fun anyway, but it was especially neat, in view of the demonstration we saw later and the tension between Maori and Pakeha that is evident in the news, to see this large, diverse group of Maori and Pakeha kids, happily singing and dancing a Maori song, with the professional performers tapping their feet and singing along quietly.

According to our guide all the people in the community act like family, and refer to each other as aunties, uncles and cousins. They apparently make their livings on tourism. Besides participating in the show, people in the community carve, make clothing and souvenirs, do tattoos, or operate shops for tourists.

We also saw the old cemetery next to the Catholic church. Because hot water or hot mud lie just a few feet underground bodies were buried in cement sepulchers above ground.
Off at one end there is a geyser that erupts frequently. Our guide pointed out people sitting on benches on the opposite side of the geyser. She said they were at Te Puia, the rival tourist stop that costs twice as much, and that owns the land on the other side of the geyser.

We passed Te Puia on our way out. It has a gigantic parking lot, fancy modern buildings and elaborate pathways, but no village. We felt pleased that we had accidentally picked the one we did.

We drove further South to another volcanic tourist attraction. On the way in we stopped at a free mud pit and watched it belch grey mud. When we got to the not-free tourist attraction we decided that one grey, belching mud pit is probably pretty much like another and drove back to Rotorua for late lunch.
We had trouble finding a spot because the restaurants close at 2 or 2:30 pm and don’t reopen until dinner. We did eventually find one, but not until we wandered quite a few blocks. Our wandering took us by a Maori political demonstration. Apparently the NZ police targeted some Maori for an anti-terrorist raid and many people (certainly including the demonstrators) are concerned that the raids were racially motivated.

After lunch we drove back to our motel, tried the motel’s spa (nice and warm), and talked about where to go next. I went out for groceries (NZ cheese and crackers, avocado, “tiger sticks” (small, flavorful loaves of bread) and a pineapple). Miriam did laundry and found us a place to stay in Wellington. We watched the Maori TV channel and an Auzzie outback serial called McLeod’s Daughters and crashed.