January 20th - Rotorua Day 2

On the second day in Rotorua Anna and I spent most of the day at the Whakarewarewa (prounced "Faka- Ray- Wa - Ray- Wa") thermal village, a small independent Maori village on the outskirts of the city that's built on a geothermal hot-spot.  Incredibly Whakarewarewa is the abbreviated version of the name.

To get to the village from the visitor center tourists first cross a bridge over a small river where the local children play in the water.  Over the years it has become a tradition for the children to urge tourists to toss coins in the water that they could dive for.  It's become somewhat of a nuisance for contemporary visitors though.  The children sound like a choir of squawking seagulls, "Sir? Coins!  Coins Mr?  Coins!"  Inexplicably they didn't seem to dive for anything less than dollar coins though.
Before our guided tour we watched a demonstration of traditional Maori dances and songs including the Haka war dance  (made famous by the New Zealand rugby team, The All Blacks).  After the show we had a thermally cooked Hangi meal, where the food is prepared in the thermal pools around the village.  My personal favorite was the kumara sweet potatoes.  Delicious.

   

The guided tour of the village started again at the bridge (passing once again by the squawking).  Our guide led us around the village showing us the beautiful blue steaming pools, geysers, bubbling mud pits, and village thermal baths.

     

Our tour guide was an interesting individual.  Everything we saw could somehow be related back to food.  Anna and I were both hungry by the end of the tour, even though we had just eaten.  She was also under the impression that the village was a modern Shangri La, always saying, “People would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to live here.”
After the tour we went for a hike behind the village on a trail around the neighboring thermal lakes.

Later in the evening Anna and I went on a walk around Rotorua Lake and saw the black swans, then met up with some friends of Anna’s at a local pub called the Pig and Whistle. Get it?

That evening a huge storm rolled in.  I kept waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of the heavy rain and I was convinced that our tent was going to blow away in the wind.