April 7: Taupo to Rotorua

Previously: April 6

Travel to Rotorua was uneventful, as we traveled mostly on major roads that sometimes even had a doubled center line with a luxurious hand’s span between the lines, giving a little more maneuvering room. Or maybe I’m just getting comfortable with the narrow roads?

While in Rotorua, we'll be staying at the B&B at the Redwoods. A substantial step up from where we've stayed thus far, but we figured we'd be sufficiently tired and footsore by now to appreciate a couple days of wallowing in luxury before returning home. The B&B is located at the southeastern end of town, about a 40-minute walk from the downtown core. That’s okay, as the location is much closer to most of the places we want to see, which are outside of town, and avoids the need for driving in the downtown area. We arrived a little after 11 AM, which is about 3 hours earlier than the formal check-in time. However, as the previous guests left early, this gave Vivien Cooper, our Chinese Malaysian hostess, enough time to clean the room. So rather than having to place our bags in storage, we were able to bring them right into our room. Vivien made me a nice cup of French press coffee (Shoshanna declined), then sat down with us and discussed what we wanted to do while in town, then gave us a comprehensive description of the options, including annotating a map of the city and surrounds as we talked. She also had many discount coupons, which was a nice touch.

Our goal today was to go to the Whakarewarewa Maori village for another cultural show and a guided tour of the village. We arrived just in time for the first performance—much to our surprise, since we’d expected to miss that one, having failed to notice that New Zealand had just set their clocks back an hour for daylight savings time. D’oh! Anyway, it worked out in our favor.

The show was similar in content to the two Maori cultural shows we’d seen earlier in our travels, with the usual displays of dexterity and strength, and much singing. One particular song told the story of a traditional doomed romance, but in this case, the woman in the tale swam the breadth of the lake to reach her lover on a distant island. The performance was a bit less polished than the ones we saw at Waitangi, though still impressive, and the singing was just as good. The hostess, an older woman, was charming and funny—though she spoiled that impression a bit by looking at her watch a couple times during the performance. Not clear whether she had a hot date, or whether they were running behind schedule. Amusingly, she had all of us join the performers in a rendition of “the hokey pokey”, but with Maori words substituted for the different parts of the body. Not sure that idea worked as well as they intended, but it was certainly different.

After the show and before the village tour, there was the traditional chance to pose for photographs with the performers, which is nice but always strikes me as uncomfortable. To mr, it feels too much “Hey, Jolene, look at me with the quaint native!”, even if that really isn’t the intent. The show was followed by a tour. Our tour guide, like all guides who’d spoken Maori to us before, spoke Maori too fast for Shoshanna or I to catch his full name. He asked us to call him “T” for simplicity, so T it shall be henceforth. He was younger than our previous guides, probably early 20s or even younger, but he had his presentation well polished and was happy to occasionally stray off-script in response to a question.

Whakarewarewa is home to about 20 families and 75 people. It’s an actual lived-in town, not just a tourist attraction, so although there are touristy things, including several gift shops, real people live here and accept tourists into their midst for most of the day. (When the tours end at 5 PM, the town is theirs again.) As an example of daily life going on, T was explaining to us how the hydrothermally heated baths worked and were used (similar to Scandinavian sauna or Japanese bath rules, to the limited extent that I know those rules), when four or five children, coated in mud from head to toe, arrived and jumped into the baths. He chewed them out (in English) because they should have known better and should have washed the mud off in the river before messing up the public baths. They cheerfully ignored him, as he wasn't their parent.

The village is built in the middle of a hydrothermal field, so there are fumaroles and other volcanic features everywhere, including little vents next to house, with the fumes directed away from the house by various pipes. The centerpiece is an area about the size of a football field that holds three central geysers and generates enough heat to warm a swimming hole about twice the size of a typical hotel pool to about 24°C throughout the year—nicely warm. The geysers bubbled and shot up water to a height ofabout about 3 metres (10 feet), with steam rising much higher. The biggest of the geysers shoots its water to a height of 20 to 30 m (up to 100 feet) when it fully erupts, which it does 20 or so times per day, but we never happened to be near the geyser when it erupted. The village also has one pool that bubbles ferociously from the heat below it, and they use it to boil vegetables—but not meat, because there’s no outlet, and they don’t want to foul the pool with fat from the meat. Instead, they cook their meat in what T called a “Maori microwave”—a fumarole that emits enough steam to cook a load of meat in 1 to 2 hours, depending on the toughness of the meat. There are a dozen or so of these cooking sites throughout the village, and they’re communally shared.

Interestingly, the volcanic field underlying the village seems about as safe as such things can be: no earthquakes, no poisonous gases (other than the sulfurous emissions), and no lava. I assume it’s monitored quite closely, as there's a geological science office in the town, but it’s worth noting that the people of the village had to abandon their previous village in the late 1800s when a previously “tame” volcano erupted without warning.

After the tour, when the other tourists had left, I asked T about his experience as a Maori in modern New Zealand. He told us that he loved his people’s culture and that he really did feel respected and equal to pakeha (Europeans), but also noted that the treaty of Waitangi was “crap” and hadn’t provided all the promised benefits. (As noted earlier, the English and Maori translations of the treaty say different things, and as you can imagine, the interpretation tends to favor the pakeha.) But like our Maori guides Mook and Charlie from earlier in our trip, he felt generally optimistic and seemed to believe that things had improved since the 1970s, when New Zealand began taking the rights of its Maori citizens seriously. When we asked about the changes had occurred since Christianity arrived and missionaries began converting the Maori, T suggested that on the whole, the European influence on Maori religion had been positive; like Mook before him, he noted that the old ways were often pretty dark, such as having people put to death in very nasty ways for disobeying their chief. Interestingly, when one of the tourists had asked him how he felt when whites took Maori-style tattoos, he made it clear he liked this (considered it to be more of a show of appreciation of his culture rather than cultural appropriation). Then he joked that compared with traditional tattoo procedures (scarification of the skin followed by pressing ash or other pigments into the wounds), he much preferred the Western needle gun, and was "never going back".

After T left, we stopped at the café to share a hangi pie for lunch. This is a mixture of all the foods served at a hangi, but on a snack scale rather than feast scale and wrapped in puff pastry. Very tasty. Also, we each had corn on the cob that had been cooked only minutes earlier in the vegetable-boiling pool I mentioned earlier. Delicious corn, though seemingly without any taste imparted by the minerals in the water.

We took a break from touring to go gift shopping for various friends and family members, about which I will draw the veil of silence to avoid ruining the surprise for the recipients. We had nice conversations with several of the shopkeepers. At the greenstone (New Zealand jade) shop, we talked for about 20 minutes with white woman, who told us she had married a Maori man and thereby earned the right to live in the village; she’d lived here for some 30 years as the only outright white member of the community. She told us that membership in a Maori community is based on acceptance by the community, not on government guidelines about the percentage of Maori blood one has or other criteria, which agrees with what T had told us earlier. The culture seems far more welcoming than North American native culture, possibly because the Maori experience with colonisation has been far less horrible than the North American experience, and the ones we've talked to feel that there's little risk that their cultural identity will be extinguished.

But it's clearly not that simple. One difference between the woman's story and T’s story was that she told us how her father-in-law had been punished for speaking Maori in school, apparently as part of some government program to eradicate the language. As a result, neither she nor her husband spoke Maori, other than (presumably) basic pleasantries. I suspect this difference resulted from inter-generation differences in lived experience, as T was at least one generation younger than she was; as in the case of Quebec’s “quiet revolution” in the 1960s, the Maori cultural renaissance in the late 1970s seems to have given the younger generation of Maori considerable hope for the future, while leaving significant scars on the older generations, which is a very nice trend indeed—and something Canada could learn from New Zealand, as kiwi efforts at reconciliation have been stronger and more effective here.

One interesting syncretic note: When we resumed our walk around the village, we headed to the “boiling lake”, which is heated enough that much of the surface is steaming, and several of the fumaroles along the edges were boiling so hard you could hear them long before you saw them. To get to the lake, we passed the tiny Anglican church. The building is designed to resemble a wharenui (greeting house) from the outside (we didn’t look inside), and below the standard-issue cross at the peak of the roof, there’s a carved image of a Maori biting a lizard that’s being held in both hands. Our knowledge of Maori iconography is limited, but we’d seen this image before described as meaning “no fear of death”. Very appropriate for a church.

After driving home to dump our backpacks and plan our activities for our last two days in New Zealand, we did a quick Google to find restaurants located near the B&B. As it happened, there was an eminently suitable option only a 5-minute walk from our B&B: Good George’s Eastern Brewpub. Good George is a brewing company, and seems to partner with restaurants to create a branded beer experience; they provide the beer and training in how to provide it, and an entrepreneur provides the food choices and trains the staff for the food part of the service. It’s the same company that provided beer at the pizza place where we ate in Paihia, so now we know that its real name was Pizza Shack, and the Good George part was just the co-branding. Shoshanna opted for prawns in a bed of edomame, lettuce, and shredded beets and carrots, with chipotle kumara (sweet potato) as the side; I wanted the beer-braised brisket, but as they’d sold the last brisket just before we arrived, I settled for a plate of ribs with a side salad and the kumara. Both were excellent. Shoshanna opted for the stout beer, which was dark and rich and lovely and not at all bitter, though not as sweet as a porter; I went for the amber ale, which was mild as an ale, but with a bit more body and a rich ruddy color. Both were also excellent. We may just return here for our last dinner before returning home.

Next installment: April 8