Te Puia is one of several places in the Rotorua area where you can have a cultural experience. All of them offer a performance and traditional “Hangi” dinner cooked in an earth oven. We did not choose to partake in the dinner, but I imagine it to be similar to an Hawaiian luau. We chose Te Puia for our experience because we wanted a daytime opportunity, a show, and it also is situated on land undergoing thermal transformations with hot mud pots, steam vents, and even a couple of geysers. Entry includes a tour of the site. You can add to the tour with a performance, a steam box lunch, or an evening performance and hangi dinner. We chose to just add the performance.
Our day began standing outside the Rotowhio marae for the traditional welcoming ceremony inviting us into the building to enjoy the performance. One man of our group was invited to act as our chief. He accepted the invitation and led us into the marae where we were seated to watch the men and women perform traditional dances and songs. They explained that the exciting dancing was designed to use all the muscles of the body including the tongue. The singers had beautiful voices for both upbeat songs and a beautiful love song.
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| Performance building from the outside |
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| Audience participation |
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| Performance building ceiling |
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| Performance building wall |
Following the 45-minute performance, we joined our tour. We began with a visit to the carving and weaving schools. We learned that this tribe has developed schools for each of the traditional Maori arts as they work to preserve them by teaching students from all over New Zealand. The carvers were working on several very large pieces that will be a part of the extensions the site is making to expand the schools so they can include more students. The weavers had pieces for sale, too.
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| Carving school |
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| A weaver stripping flax leaves |
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| Weavers at work |
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| Feathers woven into the shawl |
From the schools, we walked down to the two geysers. These geysers have an unusual eruption pattern. The eruptions last about 90 minutes with a 30 minute recharging break. The Pohutu geyser reaches a height of about 100 feet for the first 10-15 minutes and then falls back to a more sedate 50 feet or so for the rest of its eruption time. This makes it the largest in the southern hemisphere. The Papakura geyser in another location is currently inactive. It stopped erupting years ago probably because of bore holes drilled to access the water table for drinking water. Since many of the bore holes in the immediate area have been sealed the pool pressure has been building. In 2015 it erupted for 36 continuous hours, but has been quiet since.
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| The geysers |
As we walked around the rest of the landscape we passed several boiling mud pots. The largest of these named Koko after the chief of the original fortified settlement here is still expanding and will eventually force the buildings nearby to evacuate.
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Mud pools continuously grow
threatening nearby buildings |
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| Mud pool |
One of the unnamed steam vents is used to cook lunches using a traditional Maori method. The Ngararatuatara cooking pool is named after the tuatara, New Zealand’s largest native reptile. Food is cooked by lowering it into the pool wrapped in woven flax leaves.
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| Cooking pool |
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| Steam vent cooking |
Our final stop before the gift shop was a walk through the reconstructed village where we saw a cooking area, sleeping rooms, and a raised storage building. It’s too bad this wasn’t part of the tour as that would have helped our understanding of village life. Nevertheless, we were pleased by the overall presentation and what we learned and saw during our time there.
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| Sleeping room |
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| Living area on left, storage room on right |
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| A triangle from Hawaii to Easter Island to New Zealand encloses the Maori culture. |
Since we had a couple hours of daylight left, we checked out the Rotorua's Redwood Forest. These redwoods are a part of the larger Tokorangi Forest. Beginning in 1899, New Zealand planted 170 different tree species in an attempt to see which could be successfully grown in the area. The winner was the Radiata Pine, now the most important commercial species in the country. While many of the other species did not survive, the 15 acres of California Redwoods continue to thrive creating another tourist attraction for the area. Half a dozen walking tracks offer a variety of ways to experience the forest. One is an elevated track about one mile long. We took one of the shorter tracks to enjoy the peacefulness of these trees. While not as massive as walking through a similar forest in California, California has had a few hundred years as a head start.
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| These fern trees are ubiquitous in the forests we have visited. |
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| Even the toilets are designed to fit in the forest ambiance |
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| Start of the elevated track |
