Rotorua Day Four – Geyser Geezers

The day began abruptly for me with a possum related incident. In the very early morning (when it was still dark) I needed to visit the toilet. Since the ensuite bathroom facilities of our van have yet to be fully completed, I was forced to visit the public toilet located a short walk from our parking space in Kuirau Park. On the way, I elected to throw away some of the rubbish we had accumulated in one of the park's rubbish bins. The bag of rubbish we had was slightly bigger than the slot on the bin, so I had to force the rubbish in. After a bit of a struggle I managed to get some of it in, then began pushing the rubbish down into the bin. The rubbish pushed back.

Thinking there was some kind of blockage I gave it a big shove, at which point the rubbish shot back out of the slot into me, accompanied by a hellish small black furry thing that nearly sent me into cardiac arrest. It was a possum. Fortunately on contact with me it panicked and sprinted away across the park. It took several hours for me to regain my composure ...

After a sleepless morning filled with dreams of large demonic marsupials, we made our way to the outskirts of Rotorua to a place called Te Puia. This place has several attractions, including a full size replica of a Maori village, a Kiwi house where you can spy on the elusive nocturnal Kiwi bird, and an active spurting geyser. We checked out the Maori village first – viewing a traditional welcome dance, some impressive weapon demonstrations and marvelling at the marae (meeting house). There was also an information area, where you could learn all about Maori fighting techniques, and take silly (and potentially highly disrespectful) pictures like the one below (no - not the house - the other one):

The Kiwis were next, and to be fair they are incredibly cute. They are small furry flightless birds, with a long thin beak and no arms or wings to speak of. They basically resemble brown furry footballs with a couple of legs and a beak thrown on. They are nocturnal, so we had to go into a house where night and day are reversed in order to see them in their active state. They pretty much run around a lot looking for grubs and insects in the undergrowth, stopping occasionally to preen themselves. We watched them for a bit, but unfortunately could not take any photos as the flash would have disturbed them. So you don't miss out, here's a picture from Google. Everybody: Awwwwwww.


Finally we checked out the geyser. Called the Pohutu geyser it is supposed to erupt every hour or so, but when we got there, it seemed to be erupting pretty much constantly, throwing sulphurous steam up to 60 metres into the air. The minerals bubbling to the surface as the result of these eruptions had built up over the years, causing multicoloured terraces as you can see in the photos. Very impressive. Here are a couple of pictures to prove we were there:

And here's another picture of a kiwi ... just because ...