Rotorua and Te Puia

HOT pool

Kia ora!

I'm actually back In Sydney Australia now.  And Stephanie is here!!!  But sorry, first things first.  Gotta catch up on NZ before telling you about our adventures.

Rotorua was the highlight of my stay on North Island even though it rained both days that I was there. A lot of the rain that falls on North Island happens while the sun if shining,

Great public thermal park 

what I call ghost rain.  It can be fairly light to medium and is intermittent.  But there are heaps of rainbows!  Almost everyday, several per day sometimes.  There's a faint sulphurous odor surrounding the Rotorua region.  You stop noticing it very quickly.

Rotorua is a great place to view geothermic activity.  I walked to one of the two city parks, Kuirau Park, near the CBD.  It's fantastic and FREE!!  Basically, the government has to fence off dangerous areas.  So I went from one fenced area to another and saw hot springs, pools, fumaroles, mudpools.  They were all bubbling, steaming, smoking, or glopping away (24/7, even when no one is watching).  All different sizes and shapes.  I'm easily amused; I spent a couple hours looking.

Medium size hot foot pool

At one end of the park, a boardwalk (20 meters/60'?) allowed me to walk over a corner of a very large hot pool.  Between the steam from the pool and the rain, I got pretty wet.  I also slipped and fell on some mud;  I caught myself but still landed on one hand and a buttcheek.  I didn't get very muddy but my hand hurt for several days.

There were also 3 footbaths, shallow pools lined with tile.  One could hold only a few people; the largest was maybe 10 X 3 meters.  They were under shelters lined with benches.  Nice gathering places, several families with small children were in the large one.

Walkway over steaming pond

The next day, I went to Te Puia ($46 entry + $10.30 for the show) on the bus ($2.30 each way).  Te Puia is home to Pohutu,  the largest of several geysers in the Whakarewarewa Valley. Geysers (pronounced guy zers, gee zers are old men) are thought to have intricate plumbing systems including chamber(s) that fill with hot water, steam and gases. When enough pressure builds up..., thar she blows!

Pohutu erupts an average of once or twice an hour and can reach heights of 30 meters/90'.  While I was there, Pohutu gushed continuously reaching up to 60-70'.  When it's raining, the underground reservoirs fill up faster. It's very powerful to see.  Prince of Wales Feathers Geyser and Kereru, smaller geysers next to Pohutu, also erupted continuously.

The Ngamokaiakoko (Koko's playthings or pets) Mud Pool is also called the Frog Pool because the plopping mud sounds like leaping frogs.  The large mud pool is the result of acid gases and steam that cause the decomposition of feldspar minerals to form Kaolin clay.  Kaolin is white when pure but finely divided black sulpher turns it grey.  The temperature of the mud is 90-95*C (200*F).

I wandered through the valley looking at the geothermic wonderland.  The water, pools and rocks are different colors due to the different minerals and temperatures.  There were two school groups, one with 8 - 10 year olds, the other with mid-teens.  What a great earth sciences field trip!

Another Te Puia highlight was the show in Rotowhio Marae.  A marae is the center of cultural life, performances, and important gatherings and events.  Although I'd seen the outsides of several and stepped (shoes off) into the (active) one in Te Papa Museum, I spent an hour in this marae (also shoes off).  The 45 minute show was entertaining, polynesian in flavor, similar to Hawaiian shows except for the gruesome facial expressions of the men during the kapa haka, or war dance.

Intimidating? Not in a cute skirt!

I finally saw live kiwi birds!  The nocturnal house featured a pair of kiwi.  I went to the Kiwi House 3 times.  I got a really good look for a few minutes during my first visit when there wasn't a tour in there.  One of the kiwi was wedged under a small log with its back to the window.  The other one was trying to get on top of the first by  stepping on a 3" rock behind the first.  It tumbled over off the rock twice, hilarious to watch, before giving up.  I didn't realize that NO pix are allowed in nocturnal houses; I thought only flashes were banned.


Kiwi are flightless, evolved so because there were no predators before the first mammals (other than a bat species), the Maori, arrived on Aotearoa (New Zealand).  Since then, dogs, wild cats, pigs, stoats, ferrets, and possums reduce the population by eating birds and eggs.  Captive breeding programs and registered nocturnal houses increase the captive population by about 10% annually.

This haka performer was terrific!

I also enjoyed watching demos at the National Maori Carving and Weaving schools.  The carving demo on a boat paddle was crowded; too bad the other demo was on a gunstock.  Traditional weaving is done with leaves of harekeke or NZ flax, Phormium tenax.  Cultivars are sometimes use for the colors but the fibers are not as reliably durable.

Te Puia's reconstructed Maori village, art and interpretive galleries, and main entrance structure and carvings provided further background to Maori culture in NZ and this geothermic region.  As Maori legend has it: long, long ago, explorer Ngatoroirangi climbed Mount Tongariro and almost died in freezing winds at the snow capped summit.  He called on the fire gods to help and they burst to the surface of the land to save him, leaving boiling mud pools and hot springs behind.

Pohutu, Feathers and Kereru geysers

Apparently the world's three best places to view spectacular geothermic activity are Rotorua, Yellowstone National Park, USA and somewhere in Iceland/Greenland(?).  While I recall being impressed by Yellowstone, I like that there are so many great examples in a walkable area in Rotorua.  (Yellowstone offers so much more than Old Faithful geyser and fumaroles.  Ya gotta go there, too!)

I had been looking forward to learning more about Maori culture, seeing  the facial expressions during a haka, and viewing live kiwi birds.   Te Puia provided all that and much more!  Rotorua is terrific.

Cheers!

Stuffed kiwi

Cyn