I'll back up.
On Thursday, Kara and I showed up at Brandon's garage to get the car (SUCCESS) and drove down to Rotorua (SUCCESSFULLY! And without any car troubles.) to stay at a lovely AirB&B. I think I said in a previous post that driving in New Zealand (so far) has been really great. Most roads are two lane "open roads", meaning that they have a top speed limit of 100km/hr (about 60 mph), though a lot of people break it. This includes even the main highway through the Island. There have frequent passing lanes added on, so no one has been too angry yet that we haven't be going any faster than 100. It's actually hard to get Hestia up to that speed, haha! The roads are extremely well-maintained so far, and the scenery is beyond exquisite, so driving has been pain-free. We've heard it can get dicey as you go into more rural territory though. We'll see. Interestingly, the North Island is billed as the more urban and populous of the two, and you can drive for hours seeing nothing but nature and maybe a tiny town. We looked it up and the total population of New Zealand is 4.8 million. Compare that to the Chicagoland area's 9.8 million, and you can see why the roads feel empty!
On Friday morning, we woke up really early and WENT ZORBING! Zorbing is when you swan-dive yourself into a giant hamster ball filled with water, and then you ROLL DOWN A HILL. It was AMAZING. IT WAS SO AMAZING. I want to go every day OF MY LIFE. It was particularly cool to do here because, while you can Zorb all over the world, it was invented in Rotorua! I wish I had more pictures to show, but we couldn't bring our cameras in the ball and they were pricy to buy from the place. Instead, you can see the hill and the ball here. (The hill was steeper then it looks here, though it wasn't too bad.) WE DID IT.
*Kara says: this is also why the magma spike will not erupt into a volcano- the springs and other geothermal phenomena regularly vent the pressure from underground.*
It also smells like rotten eggs everywhere. Not all the time, but it's pretty frequent to catch a good whiff of sulfur on the breeze... ooof!
After hanging out in the park, Kara and I went to Hell's Gate for the Spa Day we had booked to treat ourselves. We really needed it after all the car drama. Hell's Gate was named by George Bernard Shaw when he visited back in the day, due to all of the interesting geothermal phenomena in the park. Hell's Gate is particularly cool because it's owned and run by the Maori people of the area.
We started the experience with an hour long walk around a trail that took us (safely) past the most fascinating pools and caverns. They all have really interesting names- The Devil's Inkpots, The Devil's Cauldron, and of course Hell's Gate. (That particular pool's name was coined for the fact that it has no visible inlets or outlets- it's just there, bubbling up from the ground.)
After the walk, we sat in a hot sulfur bath and then had glorious, glorious, glorious massages. And then we took a mud bath! What an experience. We both looked beyond hilarious, if only our cameras had been available. Our skin definitely feels great.
On Saturday, we woke up early again and went to Whakarewarewa, the Living Maori village. This is a village of about 60 people that is built on TOP of a geothermal activity area similar to that of Hell's Gate. They've been slowly moving the village up the hill as caverns and sinkholes form below the houses. The people living at this village have been giving tours to share their way of life for more than a hundred years, which is great because Maori people have historically been looked down on in NZ (similar to Native Americans in the states, although it seems that New Zealand is maybe making better progress as respecting Maori culture than the US is at respecting Native American cultures...).
Most daily tasks done in Whakarewarewa are done outside. Bathing is done in the sulfur pools-- apparently they don't need soap or shampoo because the water takes care of it!- and food is even cooked in the springs. We got to eat Hangi Pies and corn cobs cooked that way- delicious. We also met a Jade Carver and saw a traditional Maori performance that included songs and a Haka. So cool!
In the afternoon, we went to the Wai O' Taupu Geothermal Wonderland. This is a park similar to Hell's Gate with tons of geothermal activity. The main difference is that the different minerals at Wai-O-Tapu cause the water to be colored in really interesting ways. Unfortunately it was rainy so we didn't get to see as many colors as we wanted, but it was still really cool.
It's going well!