As soon as we arrived in Rotorua we were spirited off to a traditional Maori dinner, complete with welcoming ceremony and everything. They performed their native dances and even the food was cooked in underground pits which gave it this really smokey flavor. Only problem was that I ate about 9 helpings and felt like such shit, (along with a lot of the other guys and girls on my bus,) that we made a poor showing on St. Paddy's Day! I'm sure I''ll make it up later on the trip though.
I felt a little groggy the next morning so I thought I'd wake myself up with a little white water rafting! (This was also the perfect excuse to get away from the town that due to the thermal activity in the area, reeked like rotten eggs and made for a savage hangover!!This river boasts the largest drop (7m) of any commercial rafting company and it was worth every penny. When we went over that particular waterfall, our whole boat was submerged underneath for a few seconds before it popped up in the air like a water wing! (That's me in the top left with the instructor.)Now on a little more of a downtrodden note, when we left Rotorua we stopped off at a Maori national park to watch the geysers explode and to see some Kiwi birds. I'm not saying this was a bit of a rip off......I'm telling you that the "guided tour" took a turn for the worst when our guide told us that the Maori were the ONLY culture to describe their history in dance and song and that she couldn't remember the names of any of the actual gods that she had spent 20 minutes talking about. Also, do all national park guides keep referring to the pamphlet that you can pick up for free when you walk into the park??? And to top it all off I'm pretty sure the Kiwi birds were fake, they keep them in this tiny little glass enclosure in the dark, I almost felt like banging on the glass to scare the shit out of them to put them out of their misery!!!
