Hot Stuff!

    We spent Thursday going up the Aorangi Mountain to look out on Rotorua, a spectacular view from a lovely remote restaurant. Then we spent many hours in the town's public park, which contains dozens of fenced-off areas that you'll see in the Rotorua photo album, with steaming pools, sulphur bubbles (and other gases), bubbling hot mud pools, etc. 

    On Thursday evening we attended a presentation on Noah's Ark at a local Baptist church. The presenter had a model he had built - very interesting, built entirely to specs derived from Biblical text, supposedly.  There's a full size one planned.

    On Friday morning we said farewell to Katrina and her kids, and returned to the Rotorua museum for a few hours. The museum chronicles the building's life as a Victorian era bathhouse on one side, but on the other side there is the best Maori exhibit I've seen - and I've seen them in all the cities. It wound fluidly through eight galleries of up-to-date and extremely informative displays focusing on the origins and history of the local Te Arawa tribe to the present day, and included a display on the eruption of Mount Tarawera.  The eruption destroyed seven villages, killed dozens of people and buried the pink and white terraces in sixty metres of water.  The lake suddenly became seven times its previous size. 

    I could have spent a full day soaking in details of Maori language, legends, fishing technology, and so on. Maybe it was so satisfying because some of that information is beginning to feel cumulative and crystallizing in my brain; but these galleries were designed by a master communicator. They gave me a real feeling for the mind of the person who designed the exhibit and the multi-media and wrote up the information. 

    In the afternoon we drove to Waitomo and had lunch and a tour of one of the spectacular limestone caves with glow worms inside - partly thanks to Kathy and Lesley, our first Helpx hosts in New Zealand, who forwarded us an email coupon that gave us the deal for half-price.  That entry price turned out to be priced just right with the coupon, given the poor quality of the lunch, but the glow worms did not disappoint us. 

    The guide invited us to sing inside "the cathedral" where several famous opera singers like Kiri Te Kanawa have performed, and a local children's choir sings every Christmas to an audience of 200 people holding candles in the darkness. I couldn't think up these words instantly enough, but if I go back, I'll teach him my glow worm song, to the tune of the original Glow Worm song. It'd be fun for him to teach each tour group to sing it: 

Glow little glow worm, glisten, glisten 

We'll be really quiet and we'll listen, listen 

In the dark we'll float real slow... 

So glow, little glow worm, glow! 

    In the evening we made our way to Hamilton, and we're staying with our first Chinese couchsurfing hosts, Xiao Yeh ("Terry") and Ming, their son Joe and niece Sandy. Ming is my age. He was a high school teacher in Taiwan; Terry was also a high school teacher, but stopped many years ago to be a Mom and housekeeper.  She has the travel bug and has visited Australia, British Columbia and China already on her own; she has "dragged" Ming along on recent trips, now that he is finally retired. Here we are with Terry and Ming, with some of the fancy balloons they learned to make in exchange for accommodation at a hostel in south Taiwan; they learned this skill by giving the balloon teacher free accommodation at their home in return. That's how it goes around...! 

    Their son Joe wants to be a science fiction author, and became very voluble and animated in our far-ranging discussion of religion, economics and the universe last night - very entertaining. Another son and daughter-in-law will come for Saturday supper and we'll enjoy dumplings. Apart from that, we'll rest, do laundry, blog, and visit the Hamilton gardens. As I explained to another host we'll connect with in Fiji, we're away four and a half months, and most of the time we go like bats, but once in a while we have to stop and just hang...upside down...for a while.

Next post, Hamilton continued...and the Hamilton photo album is there.