Rotten Eggs

I’m not going to write much today. Mostly I’ll just give you captions for my pictures.

Last night for dinner I ate blue nose, a kind of deep-sea fish.

Today on the way out of Taupo we stopped at Huka Falls, “the most visited natural attraction in New Zealand,” for which reason I’d not been looking forward to seeing it. It was amazing. It’s where the wide Waikato River, as it departs Lake Taupo, narrows into a wee channel, with frightening force.

On the bright side, there were none of the usual jet boats in the vicinity at that moment. On the down side, there was dense fog. Still, it was riveting to stare at the falls’ power and color.

Another forty-five minutes up the road we stopped at one of the overpriced thermal areas, Wai-o-Tapu. We spent an hour in the café hoping vainly that the fog would lift.

We followed all the boardwalks to all the sights: Bridalveil Falls (dry), Devil’s Inkpot (dry), Artist’s Palette and other places whose names can be found in similar geographical areas in the US and probably around the world.

My cold was driving me crazy. I sneezed and eye-watered and blew my nose down the trails, using up a whole pack of Kleenex.

The rotten-egg sulfur smell managed to penetrate even my temporarily odor-insensitive nostrils.

The patterns in the landscape were pretty.

I just love mud pots. When I grow up, that’s what I want to be. I mean it. Wouldn’t it be fun just to glurp your life away with reckless abandon? You’d get to change shape, and be smooth and shiny, and fly into the air, breaking into indelicate droplets as you land.

There was an impressive chartreuse body of water that, I think, gets its color from sulphur, arsenic and acid-sulphate.

By early afternoon we’d reached tonight’s backpackers’, Funky Green Voyager, in Rotorua. We decided to spring for a Maori cultural event run by the Mitai family. A very grotty bus picked us up and delivered us to a large tent where the elder of the Mitai family, dressed in chiefly regalia, was singing karaoke to the likes of Bette Midler and Elvis numbers. Later he picked us his tribal sax.

The MC asked for a volunteer to sing a song as an offering to the Maori performers. Syd volunteered. Up she went on stage and, in fearless and strong voice, sang a verse of the round “Hey ho, nobody home.” That earned her a Maori nose-rub greeting from both the MC and a fearsome “warrior,” and a front-row seat for us in the audience. The performance/ceremony was quite hokey and Vegas, but I liked the part where they explained about the moko (traditional tattoos, remember?): who gets them and what they symbolize. The legs on these dancing dudes were sturdy enough to build a village on.

Then we had a feast cooked in the traditional hangi style, in an underground oven where meat and kumara (sweet potatoes) and other goodies simmer for four hours. It was delicious.

While I was getting tea afterward, I saw the MC and asked if I had earned a nose-rub by being the singer’s friend. He said no, that a person had to sing. “La la la,” I said. So he relented: a grasp of the hand and then two gentle nose-to-nose taps.

Tomorrow’s an early day, the result of a last-minute decision to go on a day trip to New Zealand’s only active marine volcano, White Island, offshore from Whaketani (pronounced fuck-eh-TAH-ni).