Unfortunately, Steve has had a cold since our third day here. I am doing okay, and so far my knee, back, jaw and dizzy head have not given me problems.
The cigarette packs have very graphic warnings on them. “Cigarettes are poisonous” is illustrated with the bottom of a foot with a tag on the toe. “Smoking causes cancer” and “Smoking causes blindness” have hideous photos of afflicted smokers. I guess they don’t have anyone like Phillip Morris here to reign in the surgeon general. Smoking is not allowed inside buildings, though. Also, those who roll their own can buy a bag of filters.
The Kiwis are so pleasant and polite, it is a surprise to find that many of them drive like they are in Central America. Speeding along one-and-a-half lane mountain roads with no shoulder, they pass on blind curves and leave us in a cloud of dust. I suppose some of the maniacs are foreigners, but it probably the Kiwis who have adopted another Latino custom: the home made roadside crosses and flowers to memorialize where a loved one's soul left his body unexpectedly. In Spanish, they are called descansos.
Kiwis dress very stylishly. We have not encountered anyone from the U.S. The tourists seem to be from New Zealand, Australia, and of course the intrepid Germans are everywhere. Whenever I see an overweight person and I think I have spotted an American, she opens her mouth and turns out to be a Kiwi. This doesn’t happen often, but I am sort of surprised to see any overweight people here, because in previous travels, the locals were reliably trim. McDonald’s and KFC have made their way here, so that may account for the weight problem.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, November 4 and 5, we stayed at the Funky Green Voyager in Rotorua. This backpacker lodge was not crowded, so they let us have a big room with seven twin beds and a double, along with the bath room that would normally be for nine people, all to ourselves for NZ$59. It was very simple and clean. The manager was the first person we encountered who talked like us. He was from Vancouver, and had just finished three months of work and will start touring the country next week. He wanted to know what we thought of the presidential election, and we were amused by the Obama/Biden bumper sticker on his file cabinet.
Rotorua is a nice old town next to a huge circular lake. The most elegant building in town is now a museum, but it was one of the world’s original health spas in the early twentieth century, and got New Zealand on the map as a tourist destination. People came not only to bathe in the hot mineral springs, but to receive bizarre treatments like electrified baths.
We visited Whakarewarewa, a living thermal village that has been occupied by Maori since 1350. Today 26 families live in neat and trim wooden houses along the narrow streets that wind over hills between hot pools and fumaroles (geothermal steam vents) in the ground. A Maori woman showed us around the village, and demonstrated the art of hangi, or cooking in thermal pools. Food is tied in a muslin bag and lowered into the water, which is around boiling temperature. It takes a few minutes to cook fish and veges and several minutes for chicken. She also showed us the bathing pools, through which water flows until about 3 PM, when the flow is diverted so the pools can cool. When the tourists leave at 5 PM, the resident families all come to the pools to bathe together. The pools are cleaned every night, and made available for bathing in the morning before the tourists arrive again. I thought the water felt pleasantly silky. Steve said it was greasy. It was very clear. There are no bathing or cooking facilities in the homes, which look like normal homes from the outside.
We could see a geyser erupting to about twenty feet high, about 300 feet away. The height of the geyser varies with atmospheric pressure, but it is spouting continuously. The water level in one of the pools fluctuates with atmospheric pressure, and the Maori can use it to predict changes in the weather.
The guide told us bitterly that the pools used to be larger than they are now, but hotels diverted some of the hot water to heat their rooms. She also said the geyser we could see used to be part of their village, but the government put a fence between the village and the geyser, and now only people who pay a lot more to visit Te Puia, the government’s museum, can get close to the geyser.
The Maori at Whakarewarewa have been guiding tourists through their village for over a century, but the wooden fences to keep the guests away from the geothermal dangers have only recently been built.
When the Maori die, they are washed in a special pool, wrapped, and put into a tree for two years to decompose. They are then buried in vaults above the ground. It wouldn’t be possible to bury them below ground in this village because steam and water are encountered at shallow depth. Exhaust pipes have been installed in some of the vaults to release the steam.
We were able to identify the Welcome Swallow here.
We were surprised to see the Maori influence is so strong in daily life. Signs welcome us with Ora Kia and Haere Ra instead of hello and good bye. In parks, the Maori name of plants and animals is given along with the English, and the whole explanation is often translated into Maori as well. In Wellington and Taupo, the storm drains and manholes have beautiful Maori designs on them. More of the place names on the North Island are Maori than English. Perhaps this is because the English acknowledged in 1840 that they had stolen the Maoris' land. It was certainly stolen, but the white man’s remorse occurred here about 100 years before it crossed the minds of any one in power in the US or Australia.
Like paper money everywhere, New Zealand bills are much more colorful and imaginative than U.S. greenbacks. The five dollar bill is green and orange and has Sir Edmund Hillary on the front and the Hoiho (Maori name for the yellow-eyed penguin) on the back. There are two clear plastic inserts on the bill. One is a beautiful silver fern.
On the front of the blue ten dollar bill is Kate Sheppard, New Zealand's most famous suffragette. The Whio, or Blue Duck, is on the back.
The green twenty dollar bill depicts the Queen Mum and a Karaearea, the New Zealand Falcon.
We got back to Rotorua around 6 PM on November 5 (it was 10 PM in California on November 4) and found a news station on the car radio that seemed to be saying that Obama had 284 electoral votes. We didn’t allow ourselves to believe this, because the last two presidential elections were so crooked. We parked next to Lake Rotorua, and as we watched the sun approach the horizon, we heard McCain’s concession speech. I cried with relief. We jumped out of the car because a beautiful rainbow had just dropped one end of itself into the lake. It seemed like a good omen for new era of hope, peace, prosperity, justice and civility.
We walked along the side of the lake, and came across two Black Swans on the shore with their two fluffy grey signets. We named them Barack, Michelle, Malia and Sacha. Other birds spotted on our walk were the Chaffinch, New Zealand Scaup and Feral Goose.
It’s said that you will smell Rotorua before you see it, because the hydrogen sulfide gases steaming out of the ground give the air a rotten egg smell. The smell is not constant, and I’m not sure it smells like rotten eggs, either, because I have never smelled a rotten egg. The smell they put in natural gas is supposed to smell like rotten eggs, and Rotorua doesn’t smell like natural gas.
We were delighted to find white pumice rocks on the shore of the lake that were so full of holes, they floated. We also found lots of steaming fumaroles and bubbling pools. A friend of Steve’s once took a tape recorder instead of a camera with her to Europe, and made an audio record of her vacation instead of a visual one. We wished we had a tape recorder to capture the gurgling and belching of the Earth. The magical bird chorus at Tiritiri Matangi would have been a great audio souvenir, too.
We read that the acidic gases in the lake destroy the web on the feet of the gulls that live here. We wondered what the gases were doing to our cameras, but it was hard to keep them in their cases.
We were surprised to find that big cases of real fire works are sold in the grocery stores here. Many private fireworks exploded throughout the night in honor of Obama’s election.
The U.S. ambassador to New Zealand was appointed by Bush, but there was big party celebrating Obama’s election at the U.S. embassy in Wellington. We heard the ambassador announce as they waited for election returns that CNN was on the big television at the front, and Fox News was back there in the corner. The comment about Fox generated scoffs. Even here, people recognize that Faux News is a joke.
Obama’s election was front page news here for days. People seem to be jubilant that the Bush era is over and they are especially impressed that our country has "overcome its sorry history of slavery and civil rights abuses” as the Wellington Dominion Post said, to elect a black president.
New Zealand’s economy is also in bad shape, and they need the U.S. to recover so they can recover. The papers speculate that McCain would have been more liberal on international trade than Obama, yet Kiwis seem to think Obama will be better for New Zealand overall. This is only the second time I have heard anything about the candidates’ positions on international trade. The first time was in a mass email forwarded to me a month ago by a client from Mexico, whose Latino friends were sharing the somewhat alarming news that they thought McCain would be a better choice for people who care about Latin American. Of course, in the U.S., the media had us so worked up about lipstick on pigs and palling with terrorists, that we would never consider how our election affects and concerns the rest of the world.
Being the big hot pool fan that he is, Steve went to the Polynesian Spa in Rotorua for two hours of soaks in various types of mineral pools. I went to the St. Faith Anglican Church, built to convert the Maori in the lakeside village of Ohinemutu to Christianity. It has a rather amazing depiction of Jesus wearing a feather cape etched onto a glass window, bigger than life. The window is positioned so Jesus appears to be walking on Lake Rotorua.
The pews and columns have Maori carvings of faces with eyes made of paua shells, which are iridescent, like abalone. The walls are plants dyed and woven by the Maori into beautiful latticework patterns called tukutuku.
Nearby is the Tamatelapua Meeting House, built by the Maori in their tradional style with elaborately carved beams. All this is in a living Maori village of concrete block houses next to the lake.
Rotorua is my favorite town so far. It has a winning combination of geothermal wonders, Maori culture, elegant old buildings and good food.
All the food on this trip has been exceptionally good and creative. Asians are about 10% of the Kiwi population, although most of them seem to be in Auckland. They have brought great Indian, Thai, Turkish and other cuisines to the country. Even familiar dishes here are done with innovation. I like the dried apricots slivers and green pumpkin seeds on top of cream cheese frosting on carrot cake better than the usual orange food-colored frosting carrot.
Our favorite new fast food is Burger Fuel. They use their frying oil to fuel their delivery trucks. Their food wrappers are made from paper from sustainable trees. I love their V6-Vege: Chickpea, pumpkin, cashew and ginger pattie with cucumber, mango, yoghurt and "salad" (one leaf of lettuce) in a spinach wrap. I want to open the first Burger Fuel in the U.S., but I think they are already in Florida, Texas, New York and California.
