Saturday, March 26, 2005
Rotorua
I hope that you have all taken a moment to appreciate the full moon as it passes Jupiter tonight. It's the first full moon after the equinox, which means that tomorrow is Easter (how do they figure that in International Date Line Space? Is it taken from the sighting at Mecca?) and everything is closed for the weekend. Rotorua is packed with vacationing Aucklanders. Our host at the Funky Green Voyager (a hostel) said there would be no problem getting bookings for dinners and shows however: the Kiwis will all be out on their mountain bikes.
The North Island of New Zealand is quite volcanically active -- the volcano Ruapehu last erupted just 10 years ago. There's a whole area of geysers, fumaroles, mud pools, boiling water pools, and just general smelly gas coming out of the ground. And covering the whole town, perpetually. Taupo and Rotorua are in that area.
Taupo has a Craters of the Moon site with steam coming out seemingly from bushes, and several mud and boiling pools. All the rocks have really pretty colors of sulfur, oranges and yellows and greens, and there are bright yellow club mosses growing in that warm environment. Just up the road is Orakei Korako, another private thermal area with a cave. The adaptation of plants capable of thriving in steam earns our respect.
Rotorua is a big weekend vacation spot for Aucklanders, and Easter is a big weekend -- many of them were there for a Caribbean music festival called Jambalaya. All of the hundreds of motels seemed to be completely full, and we almost lost our reservation, calling to confirm it just in the nick of time. We went to a Maori "hangi", basically dinner theatre where there's a simulation of a Maori village, the group is "welcomed" as if it were visiting from another native island, a bunch of traditional dances are performed, and then a bunch of typical banquet food is cooked in the traditional native way in a hole in the ground, which left the lamb and chicken quite tender and moist. A short walk in "the bush" in the dark after dinner showed how reflective silver ferns are in the dark, and that glow worms also live in the rain forest, not just in caves.
It is a curious aspect of cultural drift that the dances which were once performed by warriors are now done by the crowd in the Drama club at your high school. Judging from the carefully preened individuals in the Army ads on the Simpsons, the wars are being fought by them too. I'm not sure what the Warrior class is doing. They'd have us believe they were in sales, but that is dubious. Probably selling flowers on street corners with cardboard signs.
The manager of the Mitai family Hangi estimated it cost about NZD $3000 to put on a show. It costs $75 a person approximately to get in, so with 60 or 80 people there that night they made money. He also announced they will soon be bottling water from their sacred spring to sell.
Rotorua has a little thermal site called Te Whakarewarewa that has several geysers, two of which were geysing for a very long time while we watched. The sign said that the star geyser, Pohutu, lasted 1 to 5 minutes, but it kept going for about 45 minutes, assisted by its sidekick the Prince of Wales Feathers geyser. This site also had a live Kiwi in a darkened glass room, which was very cute as it ambled about (it doesn't have wings) poking its nose in the ground looking for food. Posters listed several ways that Kiwis are more like mammals than birds. It's also pretty obvious how kiwi fruits got their name -- the bird is similarly shaped and similarly hairy.
Now we're in suburban Auckland, and we'll go to the airport early tomorrow Easter morning to fly to Rarotonga, where it will be Saturday again, and then Easter the next day. So, for us, Easter lands on Groundhog Day this year. We had a nice last-supper-in-New-Zealand at a little Asian place called The Java Room, which suffered only in having the same ultrarubato cheesy 50's American music on the box, the same Muzak feeder station as in Blenheim I bet, and an inexplicable sound effect every two minutes that sounded like a jet plane taking off. The interval was just about what you would expect for a busy airport and the whole effect was like being at SFO waiting to leave except the airport here is 20 km south of town. What makes that sound in a restaurant kitchen?
The North Island of New Zealand is quite volcanically active -- the volcano Ruapehu last erupted just 10 years ago. There's a whole area of geysers, fumaroles, mud pools, boiling water pools, and just general smelly gas coming out of the ground. And covering the whole town, perpetually. Taupo and Rotorua are in that area.
Taupo has a Craters of the Moon site with steam coming out seemingly from bushes, and several mud and boiling pools. All the rocks have really pretty colors of sulfur, oranges and yellows and greens, and there are bright yellow club mosses growing in that warm environment. Just up the road is Orakei Korako, another private thermal area with a cave. The adaptation of plants capable of thriving in steam earns our respect.
Rotorua is a big weekend vacation spot for Aucklanders, and Easter is a big weekend -- many of them were there for a Caribbean music festival called Jambalaya. All of the hundreds of motels seemed to be completely full, and we almost lost our reservation, calling to confirm it just in the nick of time. We went to a Maori "hangi", basically dinner theatre where there's a simulation of a Maori village, the group is "welcomed" as if it were visiting from another native island, a bunch of traditional dances are performed, and then a bunch of typical banquet food is cooked in the traditional native way in a hole in the ground, which left the lamb and chicken quite tender and moist. A short walk in "the bush" in the dark after dinner showed how reflective silver ferns are in the dark, and that glow worms also live in the rain forest, not just in caves.
It is a curious aspect of cultural drift that the dances which were once performed by warriors are now done by the crowd in the Drama club at your high school. Judging from the carefully preened individuals in the Army ads on the Simpsons, the wars are being fought by them too. I'm not sure what the Warrior class is doing. They'd have us believe they were in sales, but that is dubious. Probably selling flowers on street corners with cardboard signs.
The manager of the Mitai family Hangi estimated it cost about NZD $3000 to put on a show. It costs $75 a person approximately to get in, so with 60 or 80 people there that night they made money. He also announced they will soon be bottling water from their sacred spring to sell.
Rotorua has a little thermal site called Te Whakarewarewa that has several geysers, two of which were geysing for a very long time while we watched. The sign said that the star geyser, Pohutu, lasted 1 to 5 minutes, but it kept going for about 45 minutes, assisted by its sidekick the Prince of Wales Feathers geyser. This site also had a live Kiwi in a darkened glass room, which was very cute as it ambled about (it doesn't have wings) poking its nose in the ground looking for food. Posters listed several ways that Kiwis are more like mammals than birds. It's also pretty obvious how kiwi fruits got their name -- the bird is similarly shaped and similarly hairy.
Now we're in suburban Auckland, and we'll go to the airport early tomorrow Easter morning to fly to Rarotonga, where it will be Saturday again, and then Easter the next day. So, for us, Easter lands on Groundhog Day this year. We had a nice last-supper-in-New-Zealand at a little Asian place called The Java Room, which suffered only in having the same ultrarubato cheesy 50's American music on the box, the same Muzak feeder station as in Blenheim I bet, and an inexplicable sound effect every two minutes that sounded like a jet plane taking off. The interval was just about what you would expect for a busy airport and the whole effect was like being at SFO waiting to leave except the airport here is 20 km south of town. What makes that sound in a restaurant kitchen?
