The first thing we do in the morning is take another shower, hoping to get rid of that rotten egg smell. It only worked a little bit.
We head out to this museum type place. It’s like one of the Maori tribe have turned their land into a tourist attraction.
Our ticket includes a welcome and introduction performance from them, hot spring steamed lunch, and a guided tour around the land.
Their performance included a haka, something that I actually was introduced to in high school, so it was really amazing to see the actual thing. The performed songs, dances, and traditional games they would play using sticks and balls of grass on string to keep a beat. They even bring up volunteers to play some of the games. Towards the end, they invited the men in the audience to go up to perform a haka. I pressure Antoine up, and now there’s a video of Antoine awkwardly participating in the haka.
We go prepare what we want for lunch, they give us a buffet of raw food to put into a aluminum tray, that they will but over the hot steam from a hot spring. Once we prepare everything, our guide takes us on a tour through their on-site university. Their university teaches traditional carving and weaving to keep their culture alive. They pay students to attend, but the students have to be of Maori descent. They have adapted to using modern technology to carve, as well as modern things to carves, such as acrylic, ceramic, and making molds for resin. Every style of carve means different things, and if you study it enough, you would know that each statue actually tells a story.
Our guide takes us to an erupting hot spring, a mud bath, and tells us several stories about her tribe. She also shows us where our food was getting cooked.
One of the unique things about this specific site was that they have kiwi’s on site and have a license to breed their Kiwis. Our guide takes us to see their kiwis, they have three, a full grown male and female, and a juvenile male. We see the female running around, and then in the other enclosure, the juvenile male is running back and forth along the back wall.
Our guide tells us that her mother was a weaver, so she takes us and teaches us how to weave a flower out of the flax leaves that are all around New Zealand.
After making the flower, we finally get to lunch. It is hot. We had chicken, potatoes, cabbage and corn. For the most part, we couldn’t taste the sulfur, until it got to the potatoes. Everything else was perfectly cooked.
Antoine took us to the activity that “originated in New Zealand”. He insisted that we had to do it. It is called “Zorbing”. I had no idea what exactly “zorbing” was until I saw it. You know those giant hamster balls that you can go into and roll down a hill in? Well yeah, that’s that. They have a whole contraction belt that brings these massive blow up hamster balls up a hill, where people are waiting in hot tubs, a staff member pours some water into the ball, one to two people jump into the ball, the staff member zips up the ball, and they just, roll down the hill. Plus, there are options to which hill you can roll down, a very steep one, a zig zag one, or just a normal hill. We change into swimwear, by the way, it’s cold, and a van takes us up the hill for us to slide into the hamster ball. Once in the ball, you can’t see out of it because it’s been rolling in grass for no one knows how long, and it just rolls down the hill. We did the zigzag hill and the steep hill. During all of this, I also got bit by a bug that left a red dot on my leg that hurt for a few days.
After the extreme sport of rolling down a hill in a giant hamster ball, we had found a cat café. I take an allergy medicine, and we go into a cat café with 19 cats. They had very little interest in humans unless we had treats or went to them to pet them, but only when they wanted to be pet.
We decided that it would be cheapest to get food from a supermarket and just eat sandwiches for the next few meals, so we head to their local supermarket chain, Countdown, get some bread, meats, and cheese(we also sneak in chocolates and gummies). That’s lunch and dinner for the next two days.
When we get back to the Airbnb, we take another shower, desperately trying to get that sulfur smell out, it still only kind of works.