A Maori Cultural Experience

Saturday afternoon we headed to Rotorua for a Maori cultural experience. Rotorua in New Zealand is like Yellowstone in Wyoming (without the organization). They've built a town around the hot pots and boiling water. Every now and then something moves and there's a big pop and life goes on. We saw maybe three or four DANGER signs and they were about 6"x6". It smells worse than Yellowstone and I think it's more active than Yellowstone. Can you imagine building a town on Yellowstone National Park? I mean really, these Maoris literally built homes around the hot pots. They use pipes to heat their homes in the winter. They've built little shacks around these hot pots and use the heat for their own purposes. I just can't imagine the United States being okay with something like that.

This is some body's backyard

And this was just a few feet away (you can see the steam, but you can't really see the bubbles)

When we got to town, we stopped at Maori church and took a few pictures. The woodwork was amazing.

After we took this picture we found out it was one of their gods...we felt kind of bad after that

We also took some pictures by the lake; Rotorua means two lakes.

After driving around town it was time to head to the dinner show/cultural experience. We hopped on another bus which took us to a "realistic Maori village". Our bus driver gave our group a tribe name (Kiwi) and we selected a chief-Chief Michael from Canada. Once we got there, we experienced a traditional Maori greeting with lots of bulging eyes and big tongues. They do this little drill to try to scare off those coming to the village.

The Maori tribe then offers a leaf or some gift for the visitors to accept



The chief of a visiting tribe slowly approaches the gift and accepts it



After the gift has been accepted, the visitors are then free to enter the village. We walked around and looked at the different set ups and listened to the Maori people talk about their roles in the community.

After this presentation we were led to a little auditorium for dancing and celebration.

After all of this it was finally time to eat dinner (which really wasn't anything spectacular; I would have been just as content, if not more so, with a McDonald's hamburger). The bus ride home was the highlight for me. The driver made note of the fact that there were representatives from six different countries on our bus and part of the Maori experience is to share a song from you tribe (or your country or where you come from). At this point I was feeling pretty restless and fidgety. Our chief went to the front of the bus and called a representative from each country to come up to the microphone and sing a song. When he shouted "USA!" Linda and I jumped up and headed to the front. We proceeded to serenade our fellow passengers with "Take Me Out to the Ball Game".

Linda, me, and McKenzie enjoying our bus ride home

It was a fun trip. The cultural experience was a lot like what you get at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii and having just done that, I felt like this was pretty redundant. It was a first time experience for most everyone else though so ROCK ON!