Caboose

The bus journey up from Napier to Rotorua wasn’t very interesting, I slept a lot of the way. You certainly know when you reach the active geothermal area, the whole town stinks. Just when you think you’ve got used to the smell the wind will change and a fresh sulphurous blast will hit you.

I was staying at Treks, a very new and very nice hostel. It’s the first “flashpacker” I’ve stayed at that actually deserves the name. The kitchen is especially good, huge and with plenty of room for lots of people to cook at once. It’s also right next door to Kuirai Park, which has plenty of geothermal activity going on — in the picture below each of the fences encloses a steaming pond or boiling mud pool.

After a stroll around the lake to Sulphur Bay I visited the Museum of Art and History, located in the former Bath House. The museum itself is a bit light on detail about the spa but the building itself is interesting and they have a couple of good audio-visual presentations, including an excellent film about the local Maori battalion during World War II. In an odd connection to earlier parts of my trip there’s a totem pole outside, a gift from the Canadian government at some point.

In the evening I went to the Tamaki Maori village for their cultural ‘experience’ and dinner. A bus picked everyone up from where they were staying, then dropped us at Tamaki’s office in town for a little audio-visual introduction to Maori culture. We then piled back onto the buses (or a different bus in our case, ours had broken down) for the drive out to the village, during this time our very entertaining driver/guide explained a bit more about the culture and chose someone to be our ‘chief’.

At the village our chiefs had the traditional ‘challenge’ — lots of face-pulling, waving of weapons and horrible noises — before we were welcomed in and could wander around looking at various traditional crafts and activities. After that there was some singing and dancing before we were escorted through to the dining room for the hangi meal, an enormous buffet of meat and vegetables.

The next day the bus wasn’t due to pick me up until after 3pm, so I spent a while wandering around town, visiting the Blue Baths (formerly a swimming pool, now a museum and venue) and reading in the public library.