After a nice buffet breakfast, complete with kiwi juice, we found our way to Te Puia, the home of the New Zealand Maori Arts and Crafts Institute, and a lot of geothermal activity. We picked up our tickets and entered the unassuming gates to the park.
Our first stop was the Maori Cultural performance, which included the traditional songs, dances and chants of the Maori people. This included the famous Haka, the intimidating chant where males assert their dominance with sneers, protruding tongues and bulging eyes. And for the ladies, the graceful Poi Dance, requiring more than a little skill to rhythmically flip a short rope with a soft ball at the end into one's hand or body to create an audible beat. Many of the songs were accompanied by acoustic guitar and lovely voices. The audience was invited to come onto the stage to join in the fun. The performers had to hush the chatty Chinese tourists in the audience more than once.
After the performance, we went to meet our tour guide for the day. The area where we met was encircled by twelve pillars depicting the twelve celestial guardians. Here we met Mel, our Maori guide, who was slow-moving with a verbal cadence to match, similar to many other indigenous peoples like the Inuit, Native Americans and Polynesians. Several times she would chirp, "Come, my darlings."
Mel led us to a hall where we chose the ingredients of our Hangi lunch. We placed our food in foil containers and wrote our names on top. These containers would be placed in a steam box over a natural steam vent, where they would cook for two hours in the traditional Maori way.
The fully carved, sacred meeting house was our next stop. Each part of the building represented the different parts of the human body. A smaller, intricately-carved, raised structure beside it was their traditional "supermarket," where all their food was stored for protection from floods and animals.
Next, we visited the Maori Carving and Weaving schools, where we could watch the craftsman at work. We all tried our hand at "weaving" a flower with flax.
From there, we walked through the model of a traditional Maori village, which included an example of the Arawa canoe used for the great migration to New Zealand from Polynesia nearly 800 years earlier.
We also stopped for a peek at the elusive Kiwi - the clumsy-looking, flightless, nocturnal bird that is the national icon, barely visible inside a dark hut with dim, red lighting.
The highlight of the tour was the geothermal activity in this extremely active area where five tectonic plates meet. This area of boiling mud pools, hot springs and steaming geysers was the playground of our tour guide and her ancestors. The Puhutu geyser, which reaches one-hundred feet into the air and erupts up to twenty times a day, is the highest geyser in the southern hemisphere.
When we finished viewing the natural geothermal wonders, we walked to the steam box and watched our lunches being pulled piping-hot from Mother Nature's oven. We watched Puhutu erupt as we enjoyed our delicious lunches of chicken, potato, corn, stuffing and pumpkin at the top of a hill.
Our tour finished early afternoon, so we had some time to drive around this little town, check out a few stores, and get gas before heading back to the hotel.
We took an adventurous dip in the sulfur-smelling, "floaty"-filled geothermal pools at the hotel; I think they have seen better days. From there we slipped into the hot tub, then the pool, and finally the saun-aaaah. A short drive to the Jubilee Deli and Bar followed, where we enjoyed a great jazz soundtrack and friendly service with our dinner. After dinner, we stopped into the hotel bar to use our complimentary drink vouchers. The woman behind the bar was covering for the regular bartender and didn't know how to make anything, so we wound up having beer. The local Speight was tasty; someone told me later this is the NZ version of Budweiser. (My taste buds are obviously not very refined.) Loud Americans were conspicuous on the other side of the fireplace. Never realized how routinely loud Americans were until I encountered them outside of America!
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