Return to Rotorua

Face mask anyone?!?!

Bubblin' mud baby!

At least this girl went to the trouble of being authentic and got her face tatooed

If you look carefully you can see the white guy, sorry, authentic Maori, on the right

The Haka, sans Japs

Just before they saw my potential and snagged me out of the crowd

After the Rihanna concert we had a week left until we leave NZ, so we decided to revisit one of the places that we thought we hadn't quite 'done'. The lucky town was Rotorua, the smelliest town in NZ as it has sulphur fumes coming from every nook and cranny as its rife with geothermal activity. It was also the scene of our previous 'Zorb' triumph. One of the things that we were still keen to do in NZ was 'something Maori'. Rotorua is the place to do that as they have cultural perfomances and 'hangi' (aka banquet) in various locations, whether it be in an actual Maori village or on stage in a hotel. Given funds, we opted for the hotel idea. It was slightly odd though when we turned up at the Heritage hotel, given that we were the only ones there in a room off about 200 seats. Never to worry though as after half an hour 50 million Japanese tourists turned up, clicking their cameras. When we were all seated the perfomance began, with 4 women and 4 men in loin cloths and such took to the stage and danced and waggled their tongues at us. The ladies showed us a 'poi' dance (twirling balls of twine on the end of a piece of string) and they needed willing participants to come on stage and demonstrate. I still can't figure out now how I got picked. Me and 3 Japs took to the stage and tried to copy our maori 'wahine', as Nic filmed on, trying to keep the camera still through all the laughter. The highlight has to be when they had 4 Japanese guys on stage perfoming the Haka, complete with tongues out and enthusiatic slapping of thighs. I think the whole thing would have been a lot better if it lasted longer than half an hour, all the performers weren't laughing, and one of the guys wasn't white. Nevertheless, after our half hour treat we got a three course meal 'traditionally prepared' of course, and we most definitely had our fill, given that we were the last ones left in there.

The next day we had free entry to Hell's Gate thermal reserve, which was a Maori owned area the had plenty of steaming sulphur pools and bubbling mud! Some of the temperatures were over 200 degrees, steamy! We disobeyed some of the rules and we stole some mud, given that they were packaging it up in their gift shop and selling it as face masks for $10, woops!