Today was good Friday but there was still plenty to do. The weather had cleared up to become quite a nice day and Amy had recommended we visit Wai O Tapu today which was another geothermal area not too far from us. We all met at the nearby cafe again, had some breakfast and headed out.
First stop at Wai O Tapu was Lady Knox Geyser. It’s one of the more famous one around the area and has quite an impressive eruption compared to the last one we saw but from what we can tell the eruptions aren’t always natural and are normally triggered on a tour-friendly schedule by having someone dump a chemical of some sort in there. It was still very cool to see and we had arrived at the perfect time to see it in action.
Wai O Tapu was pretty big! We followed the main path around and saw all kinds of bubbling mud pits, multicolored pools and all kinds of bad smells. Some of the names of the pools were supposed to represent what they looked like but it required a pretty good stretch of the imagination. I don’t claim to know my geography very well but the “Map of Africa” didn’t look much like Google Maps.
While it was all very interesting and quite a nice walk around, the highlight of the walk for me was probably the Champagne Pool, this one was pretty big and more like a small lake than a pool but the sheer amount of steam coming off the surface of the water was very mesmerizing! I have never seen anything like this before, it was pretty impressive.
We continued along the path and saw quite a lot and then headed back to the car to go get some lunch. Being Good Friday it was a little hard to find a restaurant that was actually open and ironically the place we ended up at was a pizza place called “Hell”. We ate lunch and headed back to the hotel for a bit of a break and a quick swim in the more safe and man-made volcanically heated pool.
The last item on our agenda for today was a tour of the Tamaki Maori Village. A bus came to pick us up from the hotel and the driver was pretty entertaining. After everyone for this bus had been picked up he asked us to nominate a chief to represent this tribe (bus) and from then on we would be known as the Tui Clan! It was possible that our little group were the noisiest on the bus and so naturally we all voted for Joseph, who was actually really keen on being the chief!
As chief, Joe would participate in the welcoming ceremony and he was not allowed to smile or laugh as that would be a sign of disrespect to the native people. Soon after we arrived, the chiefs of each bus formed a line in front of the rest of the crowd and we started hearing drums and sounded like war crys coming from the distance. Some women appeared above the fence in front of us and were sounding horns and then warriors in traditional clothing come out from behind the fence while another group paddled a canoe down stream to meet us. They were all acting as ferocious and intimidating as possible as a kind of “war dance”, spinning their weapons around, moving in a slow, controller, combat-ready stance and making lots of aggressive sounds and facial expressions with their tongues poked outwards.
The warriors would provide a peace offering that Joe, our chief would need to accept to show respect. A warrior approached Joe and while making lots of fast moves around him, he placed a fern on the floor at Joe’s feet. While braving the flying spear that was quite close, Joe picked up the fern and we were accepted into the village.
Once inside, each group took turns and rotated between a few stations where a Maori person would teach us something. At one station, we learned out the musical instruments they used, another about how the tribal tattoos were done, another about the boats that were used (called “Vaka”) and another that Tom, Madi and Amy got involved in which was a game that would test their reflexes. Standing in a circle, each holding a stick from one end with the other planted into the ground a facilitator would yell out the Maori word for “left” or “right” and everyone had to let go of their stick without throwing it and reach for the stick of the person on the commanded side. At each round someone was knocked out leaving Amy as the winner!
The last station was only for the men of tribes and we would learn how to do the Haka. Even though we had step-by-step instructions, I was still pretty uncoordinated and kept getting the steps wrong!
Finally we all gathered together around the Hangi where we had an explanation of how they were prepared and used in traditional villages. Then the big reveal as they started pulling out a lot of delicious looking food.
From there it was onto the cultural show with lots of singing and dancing, our food arrived and we all dug in before one more opportunity to get some tourists to attempt to do the Haka again and we formed out groups again, boarded the buses and headed home. It was pretty good show and it was nice to learn about the traditional culture in such an entertaining way. This was very similar to the cultural show I saw in the Cook Islands too. It’s great that New Zealand and the Cook Islands are so proud of their heritage and have made it such a big part of the tourism for the countries, it makes me wonder why Australia doesn’t quite have the same emphasis put on our history, although I can’t say I’ve done as many tours in my own country as I have overseas!
We got home and invited everyone back to our room again for another movie night! Amy hired Moama and we watched it all together. It was good timing because after learning so much from the cultural tour we were able to spot some of the traditions in the movie! We were also planning on eating the much famed Fruju Tropical Snow ice creams I had bought earlier but it seems out freezer didn’t too well and they were mostly liquid, but thinking positively we ended up making Fruju Tropical Snow smoothies for everyone! A nice way to finish a big day!