Rotorua

We took our first overnight trip this past weekend. It was New Zealands national holiday long weekend and we were happy to get out of a very busy Wellington. We booked a tour bus from Wellington to Rotorua. It promised to show us water falls, volcanos and the largest fresh water lake in the southern hemisphere. Instead we got open farms (meaning the animals could jump out at you, not fun for Debi) and random pit stops. We were not impressed but excited to get off the bus after 7 hours of travel. The first night we checked out 'The Lava Bar' (the bar attached to our hostel) and met a Swiss guy. He filled us in on life in Switzerland including their neautrality, the black money and the alps. We also bonded over our shared red and white flags...just doing our part for internation relations. Canada and switzerland have never been closer. We eventually made it to bed and were the last ones in our room to go to bed and the first to get up the next day as we had to meet our tour bus at 7:15am - brutal!
We were on a five stop tour for all day sunday. Our first stop was at the Maori arts and crafts museum and thermal wonderland. The maori people make up 15% of the NZ population. They moved over from the other polynesian islands between 1000 and 1300 AD. Maori is the other national language here and is taught in schools. We were glad to get the scoop on all things Maori. We then took a train through the thermal valley and saw hot springs and boiling mud! The mud is between 90 and 95 degrees celsius and boils and jumps like crazy.


Our next stop was to Paradise Springs where we saw natural springs and went for a walk through paradise woods. we then made our way to the agrodome for the unique new zealand experience - a sheep shearing show! In New Zealand there are ten times more sheep than people...and the same number of cows as people...what can we say it's a farm animal loving country. So after we learned how to shear sheep and milk cows (skills that i'm sure will one day come in handy) we were off to our next stop - the skyline gondola and luge! That's right people in honour of the upcoming olympics we took up the sport of luge. Although luge is a bit different here. We were in little carts and had to steer our way down a big hill. Super fun and since we were in the adventure capital of the north island so we felt like we needed to have a little adventure in our lives. Our last stop was the Polynesian spa. It was a natural thermal spa which sounds really relaxing and wonderful but since all the heat is provided by the volcanoe heat (aka sulfur) there was a slight odour (and by slight we mean over powering). So we only lasted about half an hour but it was cool and we were able to go from one to another getting increasingly warmer and our skin getting increasingly better - apparently...




After our tour we went back to our hostel to get ready for dinner. We went to a local hotel for a Maori concert and hangi. We had food prepared in the traditional way - buried in the ground under a stone oven. It was really good and served in buffet style (who doesn't love a good buffet!) We saw Maori songs and dances performed on stage. It was cool to see and learn more about maori legends and performance.