Last night we packed our bags and set out clothes for this morning. First on our list today was go to Starbucks – first one we’ve seen here! I got my coffee mug saying New Zealand and we had banana bread and a coffee and tea right out on the walk way.
From there we walked to Te Papa Museum. Te Papa joined forces with Weta Workshop to create an exhibition like no other. This exhibition tells the story of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I through the eyes and words of eight ordinary New Zealanders who found themselves in extraordinary circumstances. The scale of the bodies were 3 to 1. That, plus knowing how they were made (we saw an example yesterday at Weta) and the story of each individual was just amazing!
The skies opened up while we were in the museum so we got an Uber back to the hotel and gathered our bags and headed down to check out. Another Uber arrived to take us to the airport. Gertrude met us there a little later and we enjoyed some lunch before boarding our flight to Rotarua. After we landed we had a taxi ride to the Pullman Hotel.
We settled in and at 5:30 met Gertrude downstairs for our Uber ride to Geothermal Valley, the village of: Te Whakarewarewatangaoteopetauaawahiao. I kid you not. There we had a buffet from soup to desserts. After dinner we enjoyed a Māori cultural performance. The performers were very expressive in the song and chants. Everything was explained and very entertaining. After the performance we walked to the sulfur smelling valley with geysers. Some of the Māori were swimming in the pools but they were not the hot ones. The stones surrounding the area were warm to sit on.
After a very enjoyable evening we headed back on a bus that dropped us off at the front door of our hotel. We learned a lot today!
Wow! This day held all the things I’d be interested in. Having watched the making of LOTR appendices many times, I learned of Weta’s many talents, but these human mannequins are so amazingly real!
Wow! You’re experiencing some exciting things. The Māori cultural presentation looks so interesting, and the hot springs are so quintessentially New Zealand. The WETA workshop looks fascinating, and the Botanic Gardens must have smelled amazing. I noticed that ice cream was consumed again!
In contrast to the waste of the world wars it is uplifting to consider how the Maori people of New Zealand met and overcame the challenges that they had to face in the era of European colonization. Their continued success as a people is one of the few brightspots in the unfortunate history of contact between the more recent rxplorers and the settlers who followed them, and the more ancient discovers of distant lands who have inhabited those places for so much longer periods of time.