April 27th, New Zealand Day 12

On this day, we were to receive an infusion of Maori culture. A 5 minute walk from our hotel took us the Maori enclave of Whakarewarewa (FAH-kah-reh-wah-reh-wah), a village as well as a living museum. Even though geysers and hot springs are the dominant geographic feature of the area, Whakarewarewa actually means something like "The Dust Raised by the Stamping of Many Feet", in honour of a battle that took place there over 200 years ago.

Our guide was an elderly, knowledgeable and entertaining Maori woman named Chris who took us through the village. She took us around the village and showed us the hot springs as well as the geysers. We then saw a Maori burial ground and because the ground there is so hot, people are buried in sarcophagi above ground. We were then taken to the performing stage where I was called up to demonstrate a traditional Maori greeting. The Maori say Kia Ora, sort of pronounced "kee orah", which means "good health too you". The girls then took part in a ball dance while the men took part in the haka. This war dance would have been performed by both sides at the same time before battle to intimidate the other side. 400 warriors doing this and making scary faces at the same time can be quite intimidating. Like many commanders, the Maori realized that the ideal in war was to defeat your opponent without resorting to combat. If you could force your opponent to give up without bloodshed, so much the better. After our tour concluded, we were treated to a traditional Maori lunch where certain dishes, such as the chicken, are steamed in the steam vents. After lunch I wandered the grounds of Whakarewarewa and admired the various lagoons and hot mud baths.

After that, we were guests at a Maori concert where several traditional Maori dances were performed. Among them a dance with sticks and then a proper haka. The "spear" shown was not used a s a spear at all, but primarily as a club. At the end, the warriors bulge their eyes and stick out their tongues in what is called a "pukana" (POOH-kah-nah).

Later on I was taken to see some Kiwi, the national bird of New Zealand. Because of the introduction of several animals to New Zealand, the Kiwi is endangered and some predict it could be extinct by 2015. The Kiwi is a nocturnal bird that is flightless. It is unique to New Zealand and there are 5 species of it left. It can grow to about my knees and can be quite aggressive. It uses its long beak to probe the ground for worms. It also shares much of its skeletal structure with reptiles. I could only take pictures of stuffed Kiwis as living Kiwis are very photosensitive and taking photos of them is prohibited.

The driver who took me to see the Kiwis, it was a shuttle, not the tour bus, told me that the New Zealand railroads were indeed all narrow gauge being of the size 3'6". Standard gauge railway, the type present in Canada and just about everywhere else has some bizarre distance between the rails such as just over 5', which come from the distance between Roman chariot wheels. It turns out that although New Zealand once had wide gauge railway (wider than standard), it was bought up by the government who replaced it with narrow gauge in order to make it easier to work with the hilly terrain. Unfortunately, narrow gauge does not allow trains to travel much over 80 km/h and now that they have used continuously welded ribbon rails, like on the O-Train, Kiwi trains are now restricted to something absurd like 60 km/h. Finally, for those who may have noticed "Three-Foot-Six" is also the name of one of the studios that worked on The Lord of the Rings which I though referred to the height of the Hobbits, but now I know better.

I went to sleep that night somewhat disheartened as the sunrise heralded my last day on the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Photos are now available at: http://newzealandday12.blogspot.com