Egg but no bacon...

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  Rotorua, New Zealand
Saturday, February 23, 2008

So we got to Roturua - the centre of the North Island.  A literal melting pot of steaming geysers, fumoroles, bubbling boiling mud holes and sulphorous activity and you could smell its bad egginess from miles away.  It has been described as 'hell on earth'  cos of the obvious imagery it evokes, but it is a magnificant place to see all sorts of boiling sulphur mud glooping and see steam spurting out of the ground.  In the thermal parks the ground is hot to touch and warms your tootsies, which was a good thing as it had been raining solidly for 3 days and we refused to be parted from our jandels (thats flip flops to you guys) which had by now been welded onto our backpacker feet.  Now if we dont sound too enthusiastic about all this geo-thermal activity its not cos it wasn't impressive - it is.  But we had seen it all before in Bolivia's harsh southern landscape when Jess had decided to throw herself into a boiling mud hole like a WWF wrestler.  And in true South American style, nothing was fenced off, there were no boardwalks anywhere, no warning signs about, it was just you and the tantalisingly angry landscape

KIA ORA!!!

. 

But it rained and rained and then rained some more.  This made sleeping in our car a real joy - as much joy as an ingrowing toenail or an itchy verrucca.  Yes, we would go to sleep with the rat-a-tat of the rain pelting down on the roof and wake up to a soggy mess of condensation and damp clothes - oh the joys of road tripping!  Well as you can imagine cooking was out of the question in these gale force conditions, so Stan made it his raison d'être to try and blag as many free meals as was humanly possible.  We went to all the big cholestorol laden fast food joints and Stanley sweet talked meal after super sized meal for a week and a half.  Sounds great doesn't it?  The first 2 times it was great but by the end of our calorie laden week we both felt really really ill - iller than a pair of foie gras force fed chooks! 

But aside from the weather our time in Rotorua wasn't so bad - we got used to the sulphuric pong in the air and even splashed out on a Maori Cultural performance. Run by a pair of Harley loving Maori brothers this company takes you out to the village (or should we say set)  where you get to see how maori people live and work with the land.  It was ok - but to be fair it was very Hollywood and was a performance rather than a working village.  It was good - but didn't feel authentic.  The Hangi though (maori food which is buried and steam cooked over hot coals) was awesome.  We didn't talk to anyone that night - we just scoffed in silence - heads down military style, getting as much food down the cakehole as possible. 

With our bellies full of real food, we went home to our luxury set of soggy wheels and made plans to hit the road the following day in the hope of hitting some sunshine...

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