Louise Meets the Maoris

Yesterday was a rather eventful day. I'll start with the main reason Rotorua is famous, which is the geothermal activity. The town does smell of sulphur pretty strongly, although it's okay where our hostel is because we're a bit away from the lake which is the main place where it absolutely stinks (and it really does). We had a walk around the lake which is white and looks like its full of chalk.


We spent most of the morning walking around the lake and trying not to choke on the smell and then at half six we headed off for our trip to a Maori village just outside of Rotorua. It is set up entirely for the tourists, but I get the impression it's the closest I could get to a real village. They take you there on coaches and then you get to watch a few shows and listen to them talk about various aspects of Maori life. It is quite tourist-y, but I've heard from people who have seen similar things about the Aborigines in Australia and they say this was a much better performance. After the show and the walk around the village you get an meal cooked in the ground. It's basically like our roast, but you get to eat as much as you like and the food it very good (and warm, which is appreciated after 2 hours outside in the cold) and then after the meal we got a coach back at around 10.30.

The coach journey down from Auckland goes through the Waikato region, which is basically farmland. We drove through a couple of towns, but most of the journey is just green fields with lots of cows and sheep. It's looks remarkably like England though, which is a little bit odd. We did drive through one town which had a big sign welcoming people to "hobbiton" with Matamata written underneath. I just assumed that Matamata was the original Maori name and that Hobbiton was just the settlers' name for it. Seeing as the journey was fairly dull, I was looking up each of the towns in the guide book to see what their claim to fame was, although i couldn't find Hobbiton, despite it clearly being of a reasonable size. So, I looked up Matamata to see if that was there, and of course it was and I discovered that it is the town where Lord of the Rings was filmed and the set was for the village of Hobbiton in the film. (which explains why Hobbiton was not in the guide book) My Lord of the Rings ignorance is very clear! The town still keeps quite a lot of the Lord of the Rings influence because it is the only place where the film set still stands and there are lots of tours around the sets for the fans.

I leave for White water rafting in a minute and it's still pretty cold outside so I'm glad they give you wet suits!
(photos won't upload, I'm tired of waiting, hopefully will load them up later!)