Rotorua is a town that you smell before you see it. The scent of sulfur is carried on the wisps of steam from the thermal pools in the city’s central park. The town floats atop a lava-body in midst of a 250-mile volcanic rift in the Ring of Fire.
New Zealand’s second largest lake, Lake Rotorua fills the caldera of a volcano, which when it erupted was the largest volcanic eruption in the world in the last 5,000 years. The amount of matter ejected in its explosion was 100 times more than that of Mount Saint Helens. Eat your heart out Krakatau and Vesuvius.
And yet, this unst
able area is the country’s largest tourist destination. Each year 3 million visitors flock to the epicenter of a country known as the Shaky Isles. This year, it drew 3 million and two, counting Toni and me.
Usually, Toni and I avoid tourist attractions. For instance, when we visited London, we never saw Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London or Parliament. Instead, we hunkered down in the national museums, trying to fit our poor minds around the world’s greatest art, culture and artifacts which the British Empire had plundered over the years.
However in Rotorua (which is called as RotorVegas by the Kiwis), there were only tourist attractions carefully designed to separate the visitor from her/his money. So, this time we played the tourist and actually enjoyed it quite a bit.
For instance, we went to “Waiotapu, the Thermal Wonderland,” whose sacred waters pull in busload after busload of Chinese, German, American and Australian tourists. We stood in line to reach the railings to see bubbling mud pools, thermal geysers, steam vents, and the effervescent “Champagne Pool.”
We took a guided tour of “Whakarewarewa, the Thermal Village,” which functions as a tourist attraction from 8 am to 5 pm, and an actual living Māori village at night. There are over 30 steaming geothermal pools spread throughout the village. The hotter pools are used for “hungi” a traditional Māori way of cooking using steam. The cooler pools are used for bathing. Small children are carefully supervised, according to our guide.
There was also a 15-minute presentation of Māori song and dance (Haka), which is quite physical with rhythms created by slapping body parts and punctuated by wide-eyed stares and thrust-out tongues. The women dancers created rhythmic patterns by twirling pairs of white balls attached by cords, known as Poi. The poi were originally used to build up strength and coordination for women’s weaving and for men’s use of clubs and other weapons used in the frequent warfare between various Māori tribes.
Our guide also pointed out what was perhaps the most important aspect of contemporary Māori life: a preschool where all village children are sent to learn Māori for the first 5 years of their lives. In the States, Native American communities face losing their languages as the older native speakers die off. Living languages are vital for maintaining living cultures, so more and more Native American communities are losing their cultures, traditions and religions.
The Māori do have a number of advantages over Native Americans in terms of maintaining their culture. First and foremost, there is only one Māori language, whereas there were over 500 distinct American Native languages in the United States. It is far easier to teach a single language on a national basis. Second, because there is a single language, the government was able to create two Māori language television channels with documentaries, news programs and cultural events, so Māori is not relegated just to tribal matters but is an integral part of a living world.
We also had a chance to visit “Te Wairoa, the Buried Village.” Touted as New Zealand’s Pompey (not even close), Te Wairoa was a small village that was the gathering point for Victorian tourists who came to see New Zealand’s first great tourist attraction: its famed White Terraces and Pink Terraces. These were geothermal pools that had formed a descending sequence of flat terraces somewhat like rice paddies. The minerals in one spring colored its deposits pink, and the other vent colored its terraces white.
In 1886, the nearby volcano Mount Tarawera erupted, burying the tourist hotels at Te Wairoa along the surrounding Māori village. Seven or eight Māori villages around the lake were totally destroyed. 153 people were smothered or crushed in three to five meters of mud ejected from the volcano. The White and Pink Terraces were destroyed as well.
The Buried Village did an excellent job in excavating the hotels, the native houses, and the other buildings that made up rural life in New Zealand in the 1880s. They also built a museum that preserved the material culture of the times, which was brought to life through vignettes from letters of an English woman who have visited the site on her honeymoon just before the eruption.
While the museum and exhibits were quite well done, the focus was on the one European who died in the eruption, as well as the economic hardships faced by the English community. Only a passing mention was made of the 152 Māori who had died. This marginalization of the Māori continued until the 1950s and 60s when the drive for civil rights took hold all over the world. That may have been the real eruption.
