New Zealand #6 -- Valentines's Day

Happy Birthday Eleanor!

I didn't get time last nite to tell you about the glowworms. The female fly lays about 120 eggs. When they hatch the larvae eat each other so only about 20% survive. They build a nest on the ceiling of the cave and put down a bunch of sticky lines with which they trap insects. They draw them up and eat them. They are only 3mm long when young but still emit a visable light. They live 9 months and become the size of a matchstick. When they turn into the adult fly, they have no mouth so die of starvation shortly after mating. They fall into the water below where the trout, eels, crayfish, etc gobble them up. This stream is also how their food, the insects, gets into the caves in the first place.

It's mind boggling looking at the stalactites and stalagmites and being told it takes 100 years for 1 cubic cm to form. The river flowing through is the Waitomo which means "Water entering a hole in the ground". One fun thing to do would be to take their tour through an underground stream in an inner tube.

New Zealand certainly has fun things to do. Eg saw an ad on TV last night for some of these things. One was pedalling yourself in a cage hanging from a rail. Apparently it goes really fast. Another is to get strapped into a bag and then swing back and forth up to 120 kmph with the low part of the arc only a meter above the ground.Another is getting inside a ball and go rolling down a hill (short).

I checked out the marino wool/possum sweaters. Wow are they ever expensivse now -- triple what I paid 18 years ago when they were just newly on the market.

Today we went to the Agrodome for their very funny, informative show. We saw it many years ago but it has evolved. Very entertaining. They brought out about 16 different breeds one at at time. They were hilarious as well. Each had a little feeding station they were tied to but most tried to eat out of everyone else's on the way by. The fellow sheared a sheep as expected and some kids were called up to bottle feed three lambs.The visiting Koreans, Chinese kids and adults were soooo excited . I enjoyed watching them.

Then it was on to the Thermal reserve where we had a delightful Moari woman for our tour leader. We went through a replica of an old village, heard some legends, saw how they used the flax, etc. The Moari have been traced genetically to Mongolia from where they gradually moved south over the centuries to the South Pacific islands.My feeling is that the Haida Gwai people had the same origin, coming across the land bridge between there and Alaska. There are so many similarities.

The thermal area, of course, hasn't changed at all. The Pohutu geyser, meaning Big Splash, did its thing while we were there. It goes up about 25 to 30 meters. A smaller one, called the Prince of Wales, goes up about 10 meters. It goes first so warns everyone to walk out to the big one.

In the rest of New Zealand you would need to go down 30 to 45 km to find magma. But under Rotorua, you would only have to go 8 km. Consequently there are steam vents, bubbling pools, and bubbling mud everywhere. The mud pools look like a pot of porridge as it begins to boil. They are about 90 to 95 degrees C. The sulfur smell today was quite mild.

Rotorua itself is in the caldera of a huge volcano which imploded. It is 45 km wide.

Saw a statue of a Wylie soldier who died in the Boer War plus a street and a motel.

We went into a Kiwi house where they have switched day and night so we tourists can see them when they are awake. So we went into a dark building where we saw the rear 3/4 of one. They sleep 20 hours a day and eat for 4. The guide said that was why they are the National Bird --a great Kiwi lifestyle. There are about 73,000 left in the wild -- used to be 12 million. They have a breeding program plus try to decrease the number of predators which of course don't belong here. The kiwi are ground nesters plus can't fly. They have the shortest beak of any bird -- looks long but the nostrils are right at the end so they basically have no beak in its official description.

The Moari greeting is "Kia ora" -- welcome, hello, good health. Their language is mostly vowels and no word ends in a consonent.

We had a free afternoon so I went for along walk along the side of the lake. No beach here! It's all full of thermal vents so one has to stick to the path.

Later: We had a fabulous, fabulous evening tonite --and something we hadn't done before. We went to a traditional meeting place called a Maori Marae. We had traditional greetings, a demonstration of their war dance (tongues out, eyes bulging, brandishing weapons, etc.), many stations to go through where we were shown things like how they trained, traditional games (I was second last to be eliminated), etc. Eventually we saw them pull the food out of the ground . It is called a "hangi" -- wood is put in the hole earlier in the day, covered with stones then set afire. When the rocks are white hot, they put the food in. First goes the meat then the veggies. It is all layered -- traditionally separated by big leaves. Today they were in baskets. The food is basically steamed for hours and has a smokey flavor. We then had a show of singing and dancing after which we went to the dining room for the meal. Yummy -- wild pig, chicken, carrots, kumara (sweet potato) then a salad. Dessert was pavlova and a steamed pudding. Our bus driver was also the main singer and had a fabulous voice. We sang all the way home. At one point we were singing "Coming around the mountain.....". When he got to the part where we went "round and round" he did just that -- round and round the roundabout about four times!

Apparently they put through many groups each day -- our session had about 200. They have two dining rooms set up so one could be cleaned up while the other is used. There was another group behind us so they were going through all the "stations" as we ate. We started at 6 and finished at 9. This is certainly a full time job for everyone. Their faces were painted to mimic the original tattooing they used to do.