Live from Rotorua

Hello family and all! I know you must all be thinking...where the hey is Mara? She never writes anymore! Well, I'm still here. In New Zealand. Not cyberspace. Right now I'm in Rotorua, about in the northern middle of the North Island. Since the last time I wrote, Lauren and I have started our bus passes, we travelled from the South to the north, spent two days in Wellington seeing my old co-counselor and buddy Caitlin and exploring Te Papa Tongarewa, the awesome national museum. If you're into that kind of thing. Which I am. From there we powered up to Auckland and managed to see nothing, and went up for one day to the Bay of Islands. It's on the northern tip of New Zealand, and very beautiful. It's also the home to the Waitangi Treaty grounds, where (duh) the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840. Basically it was a treaty signed between the Maori and the English to prevent the French from taking control of New Zealand. The Maori thought they were just getting protection from England and the English kind of thought they got to take Maori land; it caused a lot of problems and is still very controversial today. Forgive the history lesson, but it's important!

We came back to Auckland for one night and left the next morning for Hahei, on the Coromandel Peninsula. When we got there it was pouring rain and the whole bus group tried to trek out to Cathedral Cove, the famous beach in Hahei. At one point we lost a girl and then the group split up on the trail and encountered a huge man in a poncho in the pouring rain....I kind of thought it was the start of like a backpacker horror movie...but alas, nothing so interesting. The next day, most of the bus continued (its a hop-on, hop-off bus so you constantly meet new groups of people...It's both really cool and really sad to get to like people quickly and then leave them) but a few of us stayed behind to see the Coromandel on a good day. it was definitely worth it. We went down to Hot Water Beach, which is known for a geothermal phenomenon that allows one to dig into the sand near low tide and get hot water from underneath. Sometimes it works, we were mostly sitting in scorching hot sand while the cold waves came in. It's pretty cool though. I did a kayak trip in the afternoon to get out to Cathedral Cove and explore some of the bays around it. There are pictures on facebook.

Let's see, from there we went on to Raglan, New Zealand's best surf spot. I didn't surf but the hostel was kind of awesome, they had a free ropes course and zip line that gets increasingly more fun after a few beers. From Raglan we went on to Waitomo, which is known for its caves, and its glowworms. Glowworms are actually the larvae stage of a kind of fly that has glowing kidneys to attract other bugs to eat, which is kind of gross but they look beautiful in a dark cave, like looking up at a night sky. Later that day we drove on to Maketu, supposedly the first place that Maori ancestors landed some 1000 years ago. They do like a cultural night in a Maori marae (meeting house) and you sleep over there. Like most things that attempt to teach you about other cultures through tourist attractions, it feels kind of weird. All the people were super nice and we all learned some songs and dances together, but I don't know how much I learned. It is significant though, to compare how New Zealand and Australia treat their indigenous cultures. There is much more respect and integration of Maori culture in NZ than Aboriginal culture in Australia.

Anyways, I realize this blog post is extremely boring, but I had to catch up! Today we're in Rotorua, famed for its volcanic hotsprings and mudbaths. It smells like sulfur everywhere here. So I'll leave it at that, enjoy the photos, and keep on keepin on? LOVE, Mara.