The car rental dealership was a half an hour walk from the airport hotel, we got small silver Suzuki. We drive three hours to Rotorua to our Airbnb to drop off our stuff and head to Hell’s Gate.
As someone who has seen Old Faithful in Yellowstone and been to several thermal hot springs in Iceland, I have never smelled anything so awful.
The goal of the day was to walk around the thermal sites, then hop in their mud baths and hot spring spa. The walk was an hour long, some springs were more than boiling, we could see the steam and bubbling. Some of the springs intersect with a cold spring and it just creates steam. One of them could cook a full grown pig in two hours.
The history of it, is the Maori people used to use these areas to live, and some of them still do, to cook, bath, and to generally keep warm during winter seasons. The whole site was actually ran by a tribe.
At the end of the walk, we got to learn how to carve wood. It was quite simple, we carved to tiles of wood, with some pre-drawn symbols on it. After we carved them, they painted some finishing onto it and gave it to us to keep.
We get changed and jumped into the mud bath. It didn’t smell nearly as bad as the thermal activity ones, but the smell was still there. According to everyone, the mud baths can cure arthritis. Some guy had severe arthritis for several years, came to the mud baths, and his arthritis was healed. To prove that it was gone, he walked 25 kilometers or something dramatic like that. The minerals are also supposed to help with acne and wrinkles and just cure life. HOWEVER, we were only allowed to be in the mud bath for 20 minutes or we might faint from overheating. So we rubbed mud on our face, back, arms, and chests and sat in hot mud water for 20 minutes before someone kicked us out and we headed to the thermal hot spring.
Even after the shower, the smell wouldn’t go away, but our skin did turn out to be super smooth.
We go out for dinner, but we smell, so we went to a Chinese restaurant, they didn’t seem to verbally mind.
We shower again at the Airbnb, but a lot of our clothes were doomed for the rest of the trip. Luckily, we used the Airbnb’s towels.