Where are Ron and Ellen?
New Zealand (Ron and Ellen), Fiji (Ron), 5 January - 9 March 2015
Ellen and Ron near Milford Sound, NZ, January 2015
New Zealand, North Island - Rotarua, Ohope, Hamilton Gardens
To see photos of the Maori thermal village (Whakarewarewa), click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of Rotarua's Government Gardens and the lakes around Rotarua, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of Ohope, click on the thumbnail at the left.
A vacation from our vacation
To see photos of Hamilton Gardens, click on the thumbnail at the left.
1 February 2015
Mangere NZ (5 km from Auckland Airport)After picking up our new rental car in the Auckland Airport (exactly like our South Island rental car, a Mazda 2, except blue instead of red), we extracted ourselves successfully from the airport area and headed for Rotorua. The first part of the drive was on motorway, the rest on smaller roads, much of it through farm country with occasional small towns. We stopped for tea, then onward through more hilly country to Rotarua, on the south end of Lake Rotarua. The information center (many towns have one) was able to suggest a place to stay in our price range and show us photos. They make the booking (a studio with kitchenette), we paid the I-center and they pay the hotel - it is a great system. We have also discovered that most of the I-centers have free wifi, so you see people sitting outside them using various devices to access the Internet even after hours.
When we arrived at our hotel, the owner, Jason, said he was moving us to a one-bedroom apartment at no extra charge because it was away from the road would be quieter. He then showed us various interesting places to visit on a map, driving distances to them etc. - useful information and suggestions. Rotorua is an area with lots of active thermal activity: steaming pools, bubbling mud, geysers, etc. Because of the thermal activity, you get frequent whiffs of sulfur as you drive or walk around. The Rotorua area also has the highest Maori population of any part of New Zealand. Besides our hotel, the other thing we booked at the I-center was a visit to a Maori village in an active thermal area, which includes a tour of the village and a performance of Maori song and dance.
Rotorau gets an average of 3 million visitors a year, but because the attractions are spread over a large area, it doesn’t feel overrun with tourists. Lots and lots of varied places to eat - we had three dinners there, at a noodle shop, an Indian restaurant, and a Tunisian restaurant. Our first morning we walked trails in a nearby redwood forest - the trees had been brought from California in 1899 and they have thrived. There are lovely walking trails all through the forest, which is mainly redwood trees but has many other species including the ubiquitous NZ fern trees. There were both tourists (the people with cameras) and locals (the people with water bottles or with dogs on leash) walking the trails. We ate our picnic lunch at a table outside the visitor center and had an interesting conversation with two local women who had just finished their daily walk together.
After lunch we went to the Maori village for the 1 pm tour and the 2 pm performance. The village is built in/on/around an active thermal area. Gardening is difficult because the ground gets too hot and can burn the roots unless they are protected! The hot water is used for bathing and cooking, and food is also cooked in the ground surrounded by heated rocks. There are areas of bubbling mud, thermal vents, and a pool (its Maori name translates as "grumpy old man" because he never calms down) that boils constantly, day and night. Our tour was timed so that we were able to see the 30 meter geyser go off as it does every 1.5 hours. The song and dance performance was interesting, and included some of the war chants that involve the bulging eyes and extended tongues that show fierceness to the enemy (as the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team does before their games!). After the performance we stopped in the stone carver’s shop to look at the beautiful NZ greenstone (pounamu in Maori, aka nephrite jade) carvings, and ended up having a long and interesting discussion with the carver and his wife about the stone and its qualities, where it comes from (a river in only one particular area in NZ), how it is carved, their life, and their family. Ron bought earrings for Ellen, and the carver gave Ron two lovely pieces of what we understand are pounamu. He does not buff and polish any of his carvings, but instead oils them (virgin olive oil!) to bring out the depth and color.
Our second day in the Rotorua area was for lake exploration: we went to several of the lakes in the area (following out hotel owner’s suggestions). The Blue Lake and the Green Lake are right next to each other, with a very narrow ridge in between, so you can stand on the ridge and look from one to the other and see the color difference. The colors really are quite different, mainly because of the minerals in the two lakes. We hope our photos show the difference; it was a cloudy day, and we are sure the colors would be more distinct on a sunny day. We walked part of the trail that goes around the Blue Lake, then headed further down the road to the much larger Lake Tarawera. We drove around the portion of it that has a road and houses, then had our picnic at one of the little park and beach areas. Clearly visible on the other side of the lake was the remains of Mt. Tarawera, which erupted in 1886, burying a village (you can tour the village and see the excavated sites, but we didn’t) that was the staging post for travelers coming to see the famous Pink and White Terraces formed by mineral deposits as the water ran down a hillside. The terraces were also buried in the eruption, so all that remains are paintings of them. On the way back to Rotorua, we drove around a fourth lake, much smaller. After tea back in our room, we went and walked in the Government Gardens next to Lake Rotarua, very Victorian gardens complete with flower beds, fountains, croquet courts, bowling greens, and an astounding bath house (now the Rotorua Museum) built in a lavish Tudor style in 1908.
Leaving Rotorua, we joked with the hotel owner that although the drive to the coast takes 1.5 hours, it would take us 3 because we stop at every overlook. And indeed it did take us 2.5, as we stopped at the several lakes along the way. Only reason it didn’t take 3 hours was because after the halfway point of the drive there were no more lakes! We wanted to go to the beach for our remaining time after Rotorua - but which one? After considerable discussion with various people, including the hotel owner, the women we met at the redwood forest, the NZ friend of one of Ron’s high school classmates, and (eventually) the person at the I-site in the coastal town of Whakatane, we decided on Ohope, just southeast of Whakatane. It was a perfect choice. Ohope is a stretch of beach about 7-8 km long, with 3 restaurants, a pizza place, a convenience store-ice cream shop-fish and chips place, and about 5 motels. The rest is residential, probably a mix of permanent residents and vacation/rental homes. The town can’t expand because it is a narrow strip of land between the beach and the cliff that rises behind it. The beach is spectacular - wide and flat, with rolling Pacific waves coming in along the length of it. A perfect spot for surfers and a great beach for kids. There are very few people here, even though thisis the "busy season." At one point mid-day, we looked up and down the beach as far as we could clearly see, and, including the surfers and others in the water, counted 30-40 people total. Whakaari (White Island), NZ’s most active volcano (last eruption 2013) is 49 km off the coast, and we can see it out in the water with the steam rising from the crater floor.
We have a wonderful 1-bedroom apartment in a motel on the west end of town with huge windows looking out at the beach and water. Directly across the narrow street there is a bench and a picnic table under a tree, and then the beach, so sitting in our living room is almost like sitting on the beach itself. Sit and watch the water and the surfers is what we did for the four days we were there. We walked on the beach, drove to Ohiwa Harbor at the far eastern end for dinner one night, and one day climbed the set of wooden steps that go up and over the cliff (spectacular vistas!) at the western end (Ron counted 400 steps, about an equal number up and down) to the tiny beach before the next headland. All in all, we loved Ohope, a vacation from our vacation!
Today we left Ohope heading for our last night at a motel 5 km from the Auckland airport. On the way, we went back through Rotorua, and since we had not been to the museum in what was once the bathhouse, we decided to stop there. We saw an excellent film about the construction of the bathhouse and its use for treating patients up through the 1960s, and about the history of the Rotorua area (including very effective shaking of the floor and seats during the recreation of the 1886 eruption of Mt.Tarawera!). We then took a tour that led us down to the basement to view the remaining pipes that channeled the hot water, to the remains of various baths, including a mikvah, and through the excellent collection of Maori carvings and living history exhibits. We had lunch in Rotorua before heading on to Hamilton to visit the famous public gardens there. It rained on and off all day, but we managed to get in a visit to the beautiful section of the gardens that has Chinese, Japanese, English, Italian Renaissance, and Indian gardens laid out in a wonderful interconnecting series of “rooms,” each quite separate from the other, but each leading into another. When you are in one you would never know the others existed! We would have toured more of the other garden areas, but it started to rain again, and we decided to head on to Auckland.
Mangere, the suburb next to the airport where our motel is, seems to be almost completely residential, and the only things we could find open for dinner on a Sunday night were American fast food chains: McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, and Dominos. Actually, in our wandering about we didn’t see evidence of any other restaurants, open or closed. We opted for Dominos take-out and a bottle of cider from the grocery store, eaten in our room. What a let-down for our last night! (In all fairness, last night in Ohope we had very excellent lamb cutlets with Israeli couscous, followed by ginger lemon grass ice cream cones, so that was a very nice final New Zealand meal.) A note on ATMs for others coming to New Zealand: we found that the best exchange rate was from the ASB (the name of the bank) ATMs. We routinely withdrew $600 NZ dollars. When we reviewed the charges to our US account over the first five withdrawals, the debit to our account averaged $25 US dollars more from the non-ASB ATM machines. From the point we realized this, we only used ASB machines.
We were surprised at the large number of Chinese tourists in New Zealand. We hear they come with very thick wallets. According to one of our hotel managers, those Chinese that immigrate to the Auckland area are driving up the real estate values in the districts with the best schools. Also, many Chinese students come here for university.
Last but not least, we have been surprised by the number of places we have stayed where the hot and cold faucets are reversed from what we expect in the US. We wonder if this has to do with driving on the left side of the road instead of the right!
Tomorrow morning we head to the airport, where we fly to Fiji. From there, Ellen will continue her journey home, stopping overnight in Los Angeles and arriving home the evening of 3 February, re-acquiring somewhere over the Pacific the day that was lost when we crossed the International Date Line on our way to NZ. And Ron will stay in Fiji for adventures there for the next 5 weeks. You should not expect much in the way of detailed reports from Ron, since 1) his technology is driving him crazy (he can’t figure out how to make the keyboard on his tablet work, so is reduced to hunt and peck on the touch screen with his stylus), and 2) even at the best of times he never provides the detail that Ellen does. In the couple of weeks after arriving home, Ellen will be setting up the Web page for the trip and posting photos, and will let everyone know when they are available for viewing.
Love to all,
Ellen and Ron
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Last updated: 13 February 2015
