travels with janne

It’s like a direct connection to Hell. Boiling, bubbling, and foul-smelling, the hot, sulphurous waters just under the surface in and around Rotorura create mysterious, steamy areas that look apocalyptic. Smelly steam rises from the Government Gardens in the centre of Rotorura town, where a park full of hot pools is situated; it rises from the chimneys of thermally heated motels; it rises from the sewers, and it rises from holes in the ground that appear here and there like rabbit warren saunas.

The bubbling hot sulphurous water pools sound like casseroles of water just before they are ready to boil over. Pools of luscious fine mud blop and plop like a coffee percolator that is just starting up. The sounds and the smells are not all. The water, earth and surrounding plants are coloured from a palette of sulphurous yellow, rusty red, murky grey, opaque turquoise, ashen white, and mossy green.

This is also the land of the Maori, New Zealand’s proud, original people. Like other Polynesians, they have their origins in Southeast Asia. Both men and women are often beautifully tattooed with individual, symbolic designs. When greeting each other in the traditional way, they gently press noses and exchange the breath of life. Not quite as gentle is the way they greet enemies. In this case they bulge their eyes and stick out their tongues as far as they can go, shout terrifically and show muscle almost like gorillas hammering their chests. It is quite daunting!

We were given an impression of this, as well as a beautiful love song and various games and dances in a local Maori village that has opened its doors to tourists. The village, called Whakarewarewa, is situated right in the midst of a huge area with steamy, sulphurous pools. This gives the village a rather mystic atmosphere.

The villagers use the hot water to dip food into for cooking, to bathe in and to wash clothes in. Living right on top of so much geothermal activity does pose practical problems, though. When people die, it is not possible to bury them six feet under. In fact, just digging down a couple of feet will reveal bubbling hot water. Instead, the dead are placed in stone coffins above ground, with the result that space for the dead in the village is at a premium.

Huge ferns and fern trees, kauri trees, palm trees and trees to me unknown that look like they have an ancient genetic history fill this primordial forest. It is reminiscent of illustrations showing what the world looked like when the continents were joined in Gondwana, when dinosaurs wandered the earth, before the Ice Age did it off with them, and before we humans came and mucked everything up.

Verdant, lush, mysterious. Epiphytes attach themselves to the trees like botanical penthouse apartments, providing living space for tiny insects and other organisms. Everyone strives for the top, reaching for the light. It is like walking through a rain forest but without the mugginess, the snakes, the leeches, and the creepy crawlies. This is the Coromandel Peninsula on the east side of New Zealand’s North Island.

We walk through an area containing New Zealand’s few remaining kauri trees, called Kauri Grove. The kauri are ancient, slow-growing trees. The wood is very durable making it a sought after product for timber. That was almost it’s demise but just before loggers rendered it extinct, environmentalists stepped in and now the precious kauri tree is conserved. They grow tall (up to 50 m), wide (3 m in diameter) and old (several thousand years). A great tree for a nice big hug.

At every twist and turn (and there are a lot of those!) the hilly and sometimes mountainous landscape is lush and green. When not covered with forest, the land is covered by a velvety green carpet of grass, and huge herds of dairy cows and sheep and beefy cattle graze the slopes (and burp and fart lots of greenhouse gases). The plants in people’s gardens merge with the wild plants and it is sometimes hard to see where the man-made stops and nature takes over. It must be a dream to be a gardener here.

Occasionally all of this incredible greenness is broken by clear-cut areas, where the forest has been shaved away, leaving just the bare slopes and something that looks like an ecological disaster area. It looks like forests are replanted here and there but just with a monotony of pine trees. Such a shame.