April 8: Rotorua

Previously: April 7

Today is our second-to-last day in New Zealand, and our plans are to slow down a bit without coasting to a complete halt. As the weather was good, with only a slight risk of rain, we planned to walk into town on a nature trail that runs along the shore of Lake Rotorua’s Sulphur Bay, so named because the trail runs through a large hydrothermal area on the outskirts of Rotorua and the air is nicely sulfur-scented. It’s an area that the city is rehabilititating ecologically by removing invasive vegetation, such as bamboo, while keeping out dogs (even kiwi-safe dogs, apparently) and presumably capturing any predators such as feral cats.

In addition to running through one of Rotoru's amajor hydrothermal areas, which offer more examples of what we’ve already described several times, the trail wends through scrubby vegetation (shrubs, mostly) that’s a little over head height, alternating with areas of forest. The most interesting is the “gum” forest, which is stands of towering eucalyptus trees, which are beautifully different from most North American trees. They have variegated bark, with patches of different colors such as silvery grey and olive or orangey brown that are revealed as long strips of the trees thin bark (similar to birch bark, but thicker) peel off and drape downwards over lower branches and the ground. Particularly when it’s sunny, they create a fascinating play of light and dark and color. It was cloudy today, so the display was muted but still pretty.

Along the way into town, we stopped off at an Automobile Association of New Zealand office, as the phone support staff had asked us to show our CAA card to the office staff to cover the work their mechanic had done on our tire. The woman behind the counter was pleasant and helpful, but had clearly been trained in the art of the hard sell, as she kept asking us whether we’d like to upgrade to the yellow AA New Zealand card because our Canadian AA card was only good for 6 months. We were clearly not local residents, and we reminded her at least twice that we were leaving in a couple days, but that didn't stop her for a momembt from trying to sell us the local AA product. In that, she failed. From their office, we stopped in at a large souvenirs store to do a bit more gift shopping, then returned to the nature trail.

The entire park is a wildlife conservation area, intended to help endangered species recover. There are tons of swamphens (pukeko in Maori) prospecting for bugs in the grass, enough that they seem not to be among the endangered birds. Also, many wagtails—small, sparrow-sized birds with fan-shaped tails that they flickk continuously, hence the name. The followed us in hope of catching bugs we disturbed with our passage, but also (I suspect) because they're curious and want to see what we're up to. In the water, many ducks, including the endangered brown teal (though that color combination in the name seems a bit oxymoronic) that was present by the score. We also saw many black-beaked gulls, which are endemic to New Zealand and also endangered. Here, they seem to be making a good go of it. We didn’t see any shag (the white-cheeked cormorant), but we did see black swans with brilliant red beaks, cruising in pairs amidst a flotilla of teals.

And there was a remarkable number of brown cormorants, with the number increasing steadily as we watched. I did a quick visual estimate as they settled into an increasingly dense flotilla, and there were more than 200 of them. I wasn’t sure whether to refer to this as a cormvention, cormittee meeting, or cormpetition. Choose what pleases you!

We’d planned to end our day with the treetop walk along a series of elevated bridges among the redwoods in the forest behind our B&B, and so we power-walked home. But the rain, which had held off thus far, finally began. Although the company that operates the tree walk claims that it’s even more beautiful in the rain, we decided we’d rather save our energy for tomorrow, when the rain should end and give us a sunny day. A forest of tall, really large trees is magical in the sunshine. Also, we’d booked another Maori cultural experience and hangi dinner, and they’d be coming to pick us up at the B&B around 5. Fitting in the tree walk would have been tight, and wouldn’t leave time to shower—which was necessary after power-walking along the nature trail for four hours. So we came back to put our feet up, blog, catch up on e-mail, and relax. Giant trees tomorrow!

Our last Maori cultural experience was held at the Tamaki Maori Centre. We didn’t expect much difference from what we’d already seen, but as there’s effectively no Maori presence in Canada, we figured it would be worth adding one more. We science types are all about replication! Plus, we'd enjoyed the previous experiences, and noted that each one differed somewhat from the others.

Tamaki sent a shuttle for us, which brought us and a few others to their head office, where tourists shuttled in from several locations around the city were consolidated onto larger tour buses. Five of them, in fact, and this is the end of the main tourist season in Rotorua; I imagine the crowd must be enormous during the peak tourist season. Overall verdict? On the one hand, we found the show a bit commercial, with bigger production values and a lavishly reconstructed traditional village. The martial arts of the Te Wero (the challenge) also weren’t as impressive as they had been at Waitangi, and there was much more of a crowd. I'd say that if you have time for just one hangi, Waitangi's the place to go, and if you're only interested in the show, Wharewareka is the best bet; Tamaki is overpriced compared to the alternatives. On the other hand, the overall show was as good as the others, and in some ways better; the women who were demonstrating swinging balls at the end of strings (the poi) did a few difficult tricks we hadn’t seen before. And the performers universally seemed to be really enjoying themselves and their roles.

Although this doesn't justify the additional cost, Tamaki added something that was missing from the previous hangi: Once we’d passed the challenge phase and entered the village, the busloads of people (promoted to "tribes" for the duration of the show) rotated through five stations with different themes, some of which included audience participation and all of which included one or more details we hadn’t seen before or hadn’t seen collected in one place before. The first station explained the customs related to tattooing. For example, men traditionally tattooed their whole face to tell stories of their history, their tribe, and their exploits, with the left side of the face (closer to the heart) devoted to the mother and the right side (closer to the strong right hand) devoted to the father, whereas women only tattoo their chin. The second station was a brief lesson in use of the poi for four “volunteers” pulled from the audience. The third station was a game of dexterity involving sticks that, placed on end, reached chest height. At the host’s cue, each participant left their stick standing and rush to the next stick in the sequence so they could try to catch it before it fell. At the fourth station, the men were all removed from the audience and brought together in a line to learn the first steps in the traditional hakka war dance, complete with tongue wagging. At the final station, we learned about the navigation techniques that guided the original seven canoes to New Zealand.

This was followed by the show, the feast, some additional music and dancing by the performers, and a special treat: one tour group was staying at the center, and had learned the alphabet song used to teach children the Maori alphabet, and they provided a quite decent performance. One thing I haven't noted earlier was that each of the cultural shows we've seen ended with an appeal to brotherhood and an emphasis that we're really all one big family, and should behave that way more often. Since the cultural shows were organized by very different groups, I assume this is another nice aspect of Maori culture.

On the way home, our bus driver ("Dennis") was clearly having far too much fun. He sang us songs and lured us into singing along with him, including "Doe, a deer", John Denver's "Country Roads (West Virginia)", and when we entered a roundabout, he circled the roundabout until we finished singing the whole of "She'll be Coming 'round the Mountain". Home again for our second-last night in New Zealand before a final day hiking.

Next installment: April 9