Kia ora

Update #2 for today: this one is actually about today :)

"Kia ora" means hello in Maori, which are the indigenous people of New Zealand. Today we experienced a bit of the cultural heritage of their people in some unique ways.

We started off the day by visiting the The Redwoods Whakarewarewa Forest...don't ask me how to pronounce the name. I've never seen redwoods, so it was a brand new experience for me. It was breathtaking to see the towering trees. We took a short hike through the forest and almost froze again. The tree coverage trapped all of the cool air, and I was wearing shorts! It was about all I could take to get through the whole trail, as gorgeous as it was. The air smelled so clean and crisp, and the ground was covered with fallen leaves. It is fall here, which is my favorite season, so I've been enjoying that quite a lot.

Where's Waldo, er, Cindy? Okay, I'm not that hard to spot, but it gives some perspective. We got some nice close up shots, but they could not capture the vast height of the trees.

After the redwoods, it was time to head over to Te Puia, which encompasses the Te Whakarewarewa Thermal Valley (once again, no idea how to pronounce that - these people must have enjoyed saying long words). It is a thermal valley, therefore we saw geysers, mud pools, hot pools, and an area they call the cooking pool. We weren't quite sure what that meant, so we had a look. Indeed, it looked like a fabulous spot to cook - it had the appearance of a nice sized hot tub, except the water was boiling and steaming. Quite nice to cook a quick dinner, as long as you could stand the smell and still have an appetite. Again, I'd never seen geothermal activity like this, so it was amazing to see in person, and honestly, a bit disgusting. There is not much to say for bubbling mud in a pit. Here are a couple of pictures, though!

We attended a Maori cultural performance at Te Puia. What we did not know is that we would become a part of the performance. One of the performers pulled me out of the audience to perform a cultural dance with the ball you can see. I'm sure I made a fool of myself.

He then pulled Grant out of the audience to perform a tribal war dance. The dance they did was much more hilarious than the one I had to do. Don't worry, we have video of both of our star performances!

And here is one of the geysers. It was windy and kind of cold, so I actually enjoyed getting close to the heat. There was steam coming out of the ground everywhere at the park.

We also saw kiwi birds, which don't fly by the way. They are about the size of a chicken, but much more adorable! Sadly, they are endangered. One of the kiwi birds made a calling noise while we were watching, which was very neat to observe! I'm very happy that we got to see the kiwi - definitely a highlight of my trip so far.

We spent a bit of time relaxing today, but we had one more must do attraction while in Rotorua: OGO! It's kind of hard to describe. You dive into a giant ball and essentially roll down a hill. You can either do the dry version, getting harnessed in or the wet version, where they put water in the ball and you slosh around. We chose to do the wet version on the zigzag slope. It was quite fun at first, but then Grant was trying to move away from me a bit to get a good picture and we went around a curve. He ended up on top of me with my face smashed into the water. It was fairly frightening and then I began to feel claustrophobic. Needless to say, I was anxious to get out of that ball! I might do it again someday, but I would definitely suggest staying in place. It was a wild experience, though! The best part was that we took the underwater camera in with us and got some neat photos and a video.

Getting ready to go down the hill. This is looking into the ball.

As you can see, we are already soaking wet.

Here we are going down - huge smiles!

That's all for now. We are watching a movie before bed. Tomorrow, we are off to Ohakune, a small mountain town. We chose it because it was a nice halfway point between Rotorua and Wellington, which is our final stop on the North Island.

Love, the George family