Saturday, January 7 We got up too early this morning, too early for anyone unless he had to catch a bus. 5:45 AM. To make an 8 AM departure from Auckland we boarded a shuttle at 7 AM, traveling by land and bridge to Auckland for the very first time from Bayswater. Every other trip had been waterborne. The bus station was your every day ordinary bus station, but the bus was comfortable, made a number of rest stops, and even passed through Matamata, aka Hobbitton, because that’s where the Hobbitt movies were shot, and Rangitiri, site of a major 1863 battle between the Maori and the British settlers. It poured with rain for most the journey and continued the rest of the day.
We arrived in Rotorua, the sulfurous Maori cultural center, about 1 PM, and made our way to our very second rate hotel--truly dated, clean, but very very midcentury and past needing a fluff...it needs a transfusion. But it is five minutes walk to the Maori cultural center and our bedroom balcony has a wonderful view of a Pohutu geyser that erupts about hourly for twenty minutes each time. Immediately below us are several stinky mudpots, bubbling away.
We got a Grumpy shuttle service, run by some really really old-time New Zealand folk, scruffy, funny hats, big beer bellies, etc., but very friendly (we like bears) downtown for lunch and a walk-around the Victorian/Edwardian buildings that are on all the postcards for this place.
Lunch at the Wild Rice Thai Restaurant was so dumbed down Thai that you could scarcely taste a chili pepper in it. The fried fish cakes had been microwaved and the Thai spring rolls were just too industrial and served with sweet sauce with scarcely a hint of spice. When our pad-Thai arrived, the sauce had a smidgen of gravy-scent about it, not a dab of fish sauce, a couple of pieces of meat,two tiny shrimp, half a scallion, and a smattering of bean sprouts and grated peanuts. There wasn’t even a drop of lime in it, though it came with a small wedge of lemon. John thinks Field Marshal Plaek Pibulsonggram, the World War II head of Thailand, who made it the national dish, would have wondered what happened when the dish crossed the Equator. He almost felt embarrassed for the nice owner, who is from Bangkok.
Then a walk over to the Government Gardens built in the late 19th century with a Elizabethan Tudor bath house modified to fit the whimsical tastes of the late 19th century and early 20th century Victorians and Edwardians. We didn’t go in, though the building is magnificently large and very well restored. John glanced inside and thought “this wooden staircase and grand building wasn’t worth NZD15 for a tour.”
The hotel site with the geyser erupting 200 yards from out balcony is also an easy walk, even in the rain, to the Te Puia Maori Center up the road.
As John looks back on the last few paragraphs, he thinks anyone reading this should not be turned off by what we had done earlier in the day because the experience we had last night was so exhilarating, enjoyable and truly well-done touristy evening, compared to the rest of Rotorua.
The Maori guide at the center, Carla, had a wonderful sense of humor as we walked in the rain through the Maori buildings, learned about where the Maori came from (the rest of Polynesia and probably originally from Southeast Asia), how they got to Aoroatea (the Land of the Long White Cloud, the name the Maori explorer KupI gave to New Zealand), and then a tour of the art school and weaving school.
The evening, though, was a grand climax of show of Maori welcoming ceremonies, Maori dances and war chants and then a hangi dinner of grand proportion, begun with mussels and corn as a welcoming gesture. The meat, chicken, lamb and pork, was cooked under hot rocks, basically steamed, along with kumara sweet potatoes and other vegetables. For a New Englander, it’s a clam bake using meat and hot rocks rather than seaweed and clams and coals. The rest of the meal though, done buffet style, was lovely: huge fresh oysters, huge green-lipped mussels, prawns (shrimp), octopus and a variety of salads. Considering that the Maoris had eaten birds, sweet potatoes and a few ferns before the Europeans arrived, this was quite a cuisine brought to the islands from elsewhere. [Note that the peppers, corn, potatoes, squash, and tomatoes were all developed in the Americas before Columbus arrived and brought to this part of the world. Virtually nothing we ate was indigenous.]
New Zealand has NO native mammals and no snakes, just birds, fish and a few lizards. It is not what you would consider a harmful environment. You can’t meet a bear, deer, raccoon or rattler if you move off a trail.
We finished the evening with an hour long conversation of travels and politics with a group of Aussies (four from Perth and one couple from McLaren Valley) at our table, who had traveled to the US and were looking for more things to do there. Of course, they were impressed that next week is our fourth visit to Australia.
Today we catch a bus to Napier. We hope the hotel is better than the Silver Oaks Geyserland.
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