From Adrenaline to "Culture"

(Written 11/12, 18.18)

We are currently on a long coah drive from Rotorua to Wellington, and I really do enjoy seeing the country by road. The long coach rides have gone on for over three weeks and strangely they have not gotten old!

Rotorua is a geothermal activity and Maori culture hub of New Zealand. The accent in Rotorua sounded very South African! We stayed in a hostel called The Funky Green Voyager where the people continued to be cool and interesting. Very few of the people I've spoken to at hostels have followed (what I consider to be) the "straight route" in life so far.

We had a packed out day in Rotorua, starting with adrenalin-pumping Whitewater Rafting down the bad-ass Kaituna River (where Bhavesh and I received the nicknames Bash and Crash, respectively!). This certainly exceeded expectations (which were already high!), as we were violently thrown down a 7m-waterfall and bullied by the rapids. Bhavesh was selected by the river as the main target of the bullying, as he was hurled out of the raft at the waterfall and just generally took quite a battering! Our guide from the company (Kaituna Cascades) made the trip a lot of fun by helping the river, and cracking some tidy jokes. There was a French couple on our raft who took the verbal proportion of the bullying because they were horrendously bad at rafting! 

The evening held our Tamaki Village Maori Culture Experience. For the second time that day, Bhavesh was the chosen one, being made Chief of our 30-person group! Supposedly this role gave him the power to refuse the peace-offering of the Maori Chiefs, leaving all of us exiled from the village! The evening introduced us to various Maori activities including the Hukka,  which were all entertaining, if a little simple. They laid out a massive and much-appreciated Hangi feast for us, in which the food had been cooked under the ground by white-hot rocks. The food was good! They also played out some relaxing music during the show before dinner, and to finish off the meal. The evening was fun, but Bhavesh and I both felt that the whole event was a bit too contrived and inauthentic. I, possibly naively, thought we were going to a real Maori village where we would genuinely have to be careful not to offend, and I believe this was the impression they were trying to give with warnings about laughing, et cetera. But even the "Maori chiefs" themselves seemed to be mocking some aspects of the culture. This lack of authenticity seems to be a recurring issue with cultural experiences, and although it is supposed to be an attempt to educate people of a culture that was, I think it was more an attempt to make commercial gain from a past culture that no one (or at least the group we saw) really takes seriously anymore. This may be obvious, but it's more just a reminder to prepare myself the next time I head to a cultural education event! All that being said, taken less seriously, it was an enjoyable evening! And we survived - Chief Bash did well. (The last of the day's entertainments was a very strained game of Pictionary back at the hostel!)

Not very fun fact: Lake Taupo, New Zealand's largest lake, is big enough to house the land of Singapore!