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Rotorua is a really cool little town. It took us a few hours to drive here from Auckland because we stopped off at the town of Paerora to pose with the giant Lemon & Paerora drink bottle and for lunch at the farm where some of the Lord of the Rings was filmed. The first thing that greets you when you arrive in Rotorua is the smell: the whole town smells of rotten eggs because of the geothermal activity.
On our first night here we went on a trip to Tamaki Maori Village to see how the Maori people used to live before the Europeans arrived. We played Maori games used to train future warriors for battle, ate delicious food cooked in a Hangi oven (essentially just a hole in the ground where food is placed on top of hot coals and covered with blankets and soil) and learnt how to do the Haka. The man who drove us to the village was crazy; he kept up a narration the entire journey, starting by greeting us in 60 different languages and ending by singing 'Here we go round the Mulberry Bush, the Mulberry Bush, the Mulberry Bush...' as he drove us round and round a roundabout for about 5 minutes straight. Not easy when you're driving a 50 seater bus!
Yesterday we visited Hells Gate Park & Spa, so named because the playright George Bernard Shaw thought it looked like the entrance to Hell. You can see where he's coming from: there are numerous pools of sulphur water that hiss and bubble and let off steam, a mud volcano that erupts every 6 weeks and - my personal favourite - a cauldron of black boiling mud. The Maori used to use some of the pools to bathe in, some to cook in, and others to kill their enemies in. One of the pools was 98 degrees so you wouldn't last long if you fell in that! There was also a beautiful waterfall, supposedly the tallest hot waterfall in the southern hemisphere. After we'd oohed and ahhed at all the geothermal activity we had a go at Maori woodcarving; Jak carved a silverfern leaf and I carved a kiwi bird. It was fairly easy but that's probably because we had small, regular squares of pine whereas the Maori would have had huge, irregular blocks of much harder wood to carve. Nonetheless, we were quite proud of our efforts. We ended our trip to Hells Gate with a 20 minute soak in their hot mud pool (it is so much fun to splat silky mud all over yourself!) followed by a compulsory cold shower (shudder) and a nice long soak in their warm sulphur pool (mmm). We were both massively relaxed by the time we left and actually had a nap when we got back to the hostel to recover. It's a hard life travelling :-)
In the afternoon we visited Kuirau Park where we got to see more hot pools and steam, this time for free. The park is incredibly active and you can see that new thermal activity is starting all the time because there's lots of patches of unfenced wet and steaming grass. In the Summer this park must be a great place to visit as they have free barbecue facilties and hot pools but at this time of year the pools looked a little dirty and neglected so it is probably worth going to a proper spa.
We will probably go for a walk along the shores of Lake Rotorua after lunch today. First we are washing our clothes - and praying that it gets rid of the eggy smell...
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