#!&&!% $#!+ *^@%

I just had my second big Oh Shit! moment, and I need to settle down before I fix a mistake, so I don't make another mistake while trying to fix the first one.  It doesn't help that I've had nothing to eat, and a cup of coffee, so I was already a bit shakey when I learned my mistake.  And now I'm really shakey.  lol.

I thought I would cross the International Date Line between Tahiti and Easter Island.  Instead, I cross the International Date Line between New Zealand and Tahiti, which means I booked my one night's hotel stay in Tahiti for the wrong date -- the date after I arrive.  And it's too late to cancel it without incurring the penalty of the full amount ($160!).  It's not too late to add one more night to the beginning of my stay, although as you can guess, I am super grouchy with myself, not just for messing that up, but for messing it up at the most expensive stop on my trip.  Grr.  Fortunately, I did get the dates right for the less expensive place I will stay during the rest of my time in French Polynesia.

I remind myself that I'm lucky I caught this mistake now and not at 1am on April 8th, as I'm standing in the lobby of the hotel being told they don't have a reservation for April 7th/8th but they do have a reservation for April 8th/9th.  Better to freak out at noon in a comfortable home in New Zealand than in a hotel lobby in the middle of the night.  I also remind myself that I created an emergency budget just for this sort of thing, and I've barely made a dent in that part of my budget.  So I will be O.K.  Once I get some food in me, probably.

Day 88: Wai-O-Tapu and to Auckland, NZ (April 5, 2011)

This morning I went to Wai-O-Tapu ("Sacred Waters"), a smallish park in New Zealand heated and decorated by the thermal activity under the ground. I saw decorated because it was among the most beautiful, and certainly the most unusual, land I've seen on this trip or anywhere. By comparison, only Yellowstone National Park in the States rivals Wai-O-Tapu (at least among lands that I've seen) and I while Wai-O-Tapu isn't as grand as Yellowstone, I think I prefer it because all of its little treasures can be seen in an easy 90 minute walk. There are also no cars and fewer tourists at each stop! Here are a few highlights:

I took so many photos today. There are 25 "highlights" along the 90 minute walk, and I can't even post one of each shot here, let alone multiples. You'll just have to bug me when I'm back home if you want to see more. :) The fantastic colors are caused by a number of different minerals slowly percolating up out of the ground along with the boiling hot water: sulphers, salts, antimony, manganese, silica, iron and carbon.

Here's something interesting about this geyser:  It naturally goes off about once a day, but the gap between spurts varies from 24-36 hours.  So to keep it on schedule, once a day a park ranger drops a ball of soap into the hole.  About one minute later, it geyses (is that a verb?  What's the verb for what a geyser does?).  The soap does not leave a residue and is safe for the environment and geyser.  It also makes it convenient for the people who come to watch it, although it felt llike cheating, having someone activate the geyser for us like that.

So it's just over body temperature, right?

The afternoon was spent on the bus from Rotarua to Auckland (from whence I write; the ride is smooth enough, and my typing good enough, that I can type while we ride), where I will spend my last three days in New Zealand. I am happier with the pace I've set for myself in the North Island. I'm spending less time getting from place to place and more time actually seeing and experiencing stuff. Well, that means if I come back, I know to devote a lot more time to the South Island!  And I won't catch a cold next time, either.

[Later, near bedtime:] I'm now in Auckland, and settled into the comfy home of Andrew and Rachel. I met Andrew at my B&B in Christchurch, and after knowing me for about 7 minutes, he offered me a place to stay when I got to his home town. Of course I liked the offer, but I wanted to make sure he meant it, so I told him to ask his wife then get back to me. He did and he did and the invitation stood, and here I am. They are a really nice couple, laid back and good at conversation. I expect I'll spend much of my time here with one or both of them, but I might give them a break from my presence a little bit too.  I'm sensitive about wearing out my welcome.  :)

Andrew and Rachel picked me up from the bus stop and we went out for dinner. When we got back, we were mostly chatting, but an episode of Law & Order was on in the background, and it reminded me how little I've watched TV. Other than when I was in Tanzania, and watching the news about Egypt with Abdul, I've watched about 2 hours of TV on this whole trip, and about 90 minutes of that was in Sri Lanka, when Sarath's family was watching their version of American Idol. Many of my hotel rooms had TV in them. Looking back, maybe I should have turned some of them on. Like in Ghana -- what's the TV like there? Or Cambodia? Alas, I'll never know because I just don't care about TV. I can probably cross "cable" off the list of things I'll need to acquire when I get back home.

Day 87: Rotarua, NZ Part II (April 4, 2011)

Last night I went to a local Maori show, followed by a trip to a nature preserve to see the nocturnal kiwi bird.  We saw three kiwis and they are pretty funny.  Technically they are classified as birds but they could also be mammals (for example, they have belly buttons!).  We couldn't take any photos because it freaks them out, but they were very cute.  They don't fly, the just scuttle around the ground.  They don't really move like birds, either.  More like, I dunno, some find of rodent.  Sadly, they are endangered birds and in the South Island, are on the verge of extinction.  The birds in the north can lay several eggs each year, but the southern ones lay only one or two.  And foreign animals that were introduced to the islands in the 19th Century have killed, and continue to kill, a lot of them.  Plus, the animals that were later brought in to kill those predators also eat the kiwis (duh!).

The Maori show was pretty cool, although the dinner included with it wasn't that great.  And it was mostly english food, not Maori, other than some sweet potatoes, which were yucky.  /yuck face/  But the show was worth seeing.  The performers told us that they live like westerners now, but respect their Maori heritage so they work to keep it alive through rituals and shows.

So we saw some of the war dances, their social dances, fighting techniques, etc.  And got an explanation of how the Maori used to live and what their face tatoos mean.  Basically, the men are tatooed with 4 different "birds" -- the owl, kiwi, parrot and bat.  And the women are tattooed with the owl.

I struck up a friendship with another single traveler who was at the show, Christina from Germany.  She thinks that the european New Zealanders have always treated the Maori fairly decently and with a fair amount of respect (at least compared to some other colonizers, like Australia) and in turn, the Maori take a lot of pride in their culture.  I suspect she's right.  New Zealanders generally have adopted at least some of the Maori traditions (or at least honor them), like the All Blacks rugby team, which does this war dance before each match.  (Thanks to Ken for the link.) 

Oh, and the weirdest part of last night's show was the entertainment during dinner.  It was a native New Zealander of Maori descent.  He played the guitar and the saxaphone accompanied by one of those machines from the 1970s that plays easy listening beats in the background.  And his selection was mostly american country western (Willie Nelson was a big favorite of his) and old american standards.  Christina suggested he was going for a Hawaiian sound, which made a little sense, since Maori music is related to other pacific islander groups.

He's even wearing his cowboy hat.

Day 87: Rotorua, NZ Part I (April 4, 2011)

I'm in Rotorua, which is about in the middle of the North Island of New Zealand.  It's most well known for its sulpher hot springs, some unusual and beautiful geographic features, and Maori culture, and is on the shores of Sulpher Bay.

I spent the early part of the day walking around town and stopping at some sulpher pools to bath.  Well, to soak; I took a bath after the soak.  The part of town I'm staying in looks like a normal little town.  Lots of hostels, cafes, shops, banks, etc.  But apparently all around, including in parks in the town, are hot springs.  So the air has a faint stinky smell.  I shouldn't say stinky -- it's not that bad.  I wouldn't want my house to smell like this town, but it's not a bothersome smell, just ... different. 

The pools steam, even in warm weather.

And of course, they make for great hot baths:

The historic baths.

The modern baths.  There are both acidic and alkaline baths here.

I predict one of the next big developments in the web and TV will be the introduction of odor to enrich the experience.  I know John Waters tried this with his Smell-O-Vision in Polyester and it didn't really take off.  But I have high hopes.  Since I can't share the smell now, though, here are some visual representations of what sulpher smells like:

Lest you think the entire town is bleak and barren and stinky, I assure you that's not the case.  There is some cute turn-of-the century architecture here, and lots of greenery, which is extra colorful now that fall is beginning to turn the leaves different shades.

Silliest hat ever.

Tonight I have a ticket to one of the local Maori cultural shows.  I'm a little wary because I'm afraid it will either be (1) cheesy, (2) exploitative of the natives or (3) both.  But there are several in the area, and my innkeeper said they are pretty interesting and the Maoris take their rituals very seriously.  I'll see for myself in a few hours, and will post more later or tomorrow.

Day 86: The Bus, New Zealand (April 3, 2011)

I spent eight freaking hours on the bus today, getting from Wellington to Rotorua.  That's eight hours.  And this one didn't even have commentary or photo stops along the way.  So it was eight hours of watching farmland and dinky little towns roll by.  I underestimated the size of New Zealand and overestimated the speed of buses.

The good news is, I'll be in Rotorua for a day and a half, then in Auckland for 3 days, so my internal travels are almost done!  Rotorua, on a Sunday night at 7pm, is a ghost town.  The grocery store was open, as was a sushi restaurant, so I stocked up on food for the next couple of days and had some mediocre sushi tonight.  The food in New Zealand has generally been quite good.  They have a lot of baked goods that are flavorful and filling.  So tonight's dinner was a bit of a letdown by comparison.  No big deal.  I might actually go so sleep early tonight so I can get an early start tomorrow, and see as much as possible.

Finally, I am staying in the smallest motel room I've ever seen.  It is larger than those coffin hotel rooms in Japan, but just barely.  There is a single bed, which stretches the entire length of the room, and a 24" wide expanse (lol "expanse") of carpet next to it, and a shelf above the bed.  And that it it.  The door does not even open all the way.  Oh well, at $27 USD/night, I'll take it.

That's my room, seen from outside the window.

Day 85: Wellington, NZ (April 2, 2011)

I can't say that I love Wellington... maybe it would grow on me if I had more time here... but I liked it enough for one day, and saw two really cool local places that were worth the stop.

I spent oh, maybe an hour or more just walking around. Wellington is pretty compact, so it's easy to walk. I didn't really get the sense that there is one architectural style that dominates. It's more of a mix of some cool buildings and some ugly buildings. A few bits of art thrown in as well.

The Floating Metal Ball.

The first very cool stop was Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand. I'd planned to spend maybe 1-2 hours there, and wound up spending 4 without getting bored, then it closed and I had to leave. :( It's museum of a whole host of things related to New Zealand -- the animals, people, history, land, earthquakes, art, immigration, etc. It's divided into about 10 sections, each one devoted to one element of New Zealand, and each section is very rich. Lots of visual and written material and, where appropriate, audio and video too.

I feel dumb for just today learning that New Zealand's real name is Aotearoa, which means A Long White Cloud.

When the museum closed, I wandered over to the cable car that rides up the hill past the Botanical Gardens, to get to the Carter Observatory. It had an exhibit about the stars and solar system (a pretty detailed one, at that), a planetarium with a really great show (it put the Mount Cook plantarium to shame!), and an observatory that is open for viewing on Saturday nights when the weather is good, as it was today.

Despite my knowledge of astronomy, I never paid much attention to telescopes before. It turns out, they each have about 1,000 moving parts, and the telescope operator had to adjust every single one and the dome itself before we could start viewing. And only one of these parts was motorized: the outer dome. Everything else, including the inner dome, had to be adjusted by hand. So that took about an hour. It was a pretty strange hour. Once the operator started tinkering with the equipment, everyone got really quiet. In the entire hour, only the operator spoke, and he only said like three sentences until he'd gotten the telescope pointed where he wanted it to go. It was cold, and I was getting hungry and impatient, but I wasn't going to miss the rare opportunity to look through a real telescope.

And I was rewarded with a view of The Jewel Box -- a cluster of unusually colorful stars that can't be seen in the northern hemisphere. I did pass up the opportunity to see Saturn, but I would have had to wait another hour and I've already seen Saturn (complete with rings) from the observatory in Cleveland.

The Jewel Box.  (Not my photo.)

Now I'm in my (cold) hostel room, with a belly full of meat pies, a New Zealand "delicacy," just writing and reading until it's time for bed. I've got another long bus ride tomorrow (sigh) but at least it's not at the crack of dawn. Also, it's now fall in New Zealand and their daylight savings time ends tonight, so I get an extra hour of sleep when we fall back (yay).

Day 84: Travel to Wellington (April 1, 2011)

Being April Fool's Day, I wanted to write a very silly account of my day. But let's face it -- I'm just not that funny. So here was my day:

Bus to Picton; ferry to Wellington; managed not to throw up; walked to hostel; ate; read; booked future hotels; ate. Fell asleep at an unusually early hour. And did I mention I ate? I was ravenously hungry all day. Maybe my cold is demanding to be fed?