Maori Hangi dinner! and beyond

This is a picture of the sculpture I spoke about before, but somehow lost in the shuffle of pictures. Bronze, patinated and very interesting. About 12 or so feet tall too!


























This is the beginning of our evening at the Tamaki Brothers Maori village and Hangi dinner event that we attended. There are quite a few of these types of evenings on offer in the Rotorua area and this was we chose because it had some cultural history attched to it.
We arrived (one of several busloads) in the early evening. This is winter here, remember, and it was quite cool. I regretted not having put on my long underwear as we stood around while they did this welcome stance.
We were then brought through to the village they had set up in the woods.

At this point the wind is whistling away and the sky is showing every star it has to offer. The Maori are all barefooted! Yikes! They demonstrated all kinds of carving, rope weaving and all the other necessities of life in olden times.




























We enjoyed stories and chatting with them. We were really cold and were hoping that they would soon take us into the Marai/dinner hall soon.




















There were quite a few of these small buildings around the village, which must represent how they lived at one time. Mind you these were very small buidings and they were probably miniaturized just to show. They each had different things in them. Foods, craft items, bones and weavings. All sorts of things.









More of the beautiful carving that was on everything in the village.

















Now we are in the building and the ceremony of welcome continues. There were delegates (kings) of each bus that had to greet the King of the village. This was all very ritualized and they were both serious and having a good joking time.















This was the King. They all had the tatoos on their faces and the women had them on their chins only. They spent quite a while demonstrating and telling us what each weapon could do. "This cleaver is used this way (small twist of the arm) and will lift the top of your enemy's head off ". "This spear (with cleaver on end) used this way will split open you enemy's chest" etc. etc.

Then they sang a lot of songs of bravery and love all mixed up together.
The women did dances that included a lot of wrapped spheres on cords that I think were for knocking your enemy's block off.



















This is one of the songs with dancing that was demonstrating the abilities of our hosts to separated life and limb from one another. It was all very impressive and also very chilling to think of such a violent life.
















This woman is not only smiling at us, she is showing widened eyes, which is supposed to frighten and impress. When the men did that and the tongue stuck out, I must admit some discomfort of the fierce look of them all.

















This was one of the male dancers, just watching. All of the man were quite tall and robust in their build.




















The next day, we were on our way to Napier. This is the bus station and information centre. We had enjoyed our visit to the lake and it's surrounds and were now on the next leg of our journey.





















The landscape through this part was low mountains. We were travelling east south east, and were going to pass right by a range of mountains that are very high and have snow on them pretty much all year round.
















This part was soft and rolling and absolutely full of sheep and cattle. There were some places that were a dead ringer for a John Constable painting.









































From the bus getting near the town. In the town, it was full of ski shops and snow bunnies. The daytime temp in the town was at least 12 degrees Celcius, but the snow on the mountain was apparently nice and deep!
More far away views.
We didn't stop in this town, so all the pictures are from the bus. I had a bit of trouble getting one in focus too.
There thy are in all their soft focus splendor!



These were trees being grown. They can get a 60 foot tree in less than 25 years! Wow! When you click on the picture, you will see the little guys on the left compared to the big ones on the right.

Rotorua and Lake Taupo- part 1

The countryside around Auckland was so beautifully jewel like in it's greenness. We went for a ride to see it and visited a working sheep farm. Again, I was amazed at the strength of sheep, to stand up with a wet coat of wool. We saw lots of Pukekos in the fields, lots of brilliantly black and white cows and grapefruit on the trees. Nina and I took some of those along for the rest of our touring around Lake Taupo. Breakfasts in the hostels was oatmeal, half grapefruit, coffee or tea and toasts. Good fuel for all the walking we were doing.






The bananas growing in the suburban yards still amaze me. This is wintertime with almost frosty mornings! Goes to show that tropical plants can take a lot of very cool weather and still thrive.











The "Villas" of New Zealand are very charming. A lot have, of course, been completely redone inside and are exquisite and exquisitely expensive. This one was in the very trendy area of Auckland.











In that same area, we saw some large historic houses that had been completely restored. By noontime, with the sun out, it warmed up to about 18 degrees celcius and was very comfortable. The sun was harsh though, and I always wore a hat.













Now we're on the bus to Rotorua. We had to backtrack south, to a town called Hamilton, I believe, to then get on a route that took us through passes to Lake Taupo. We saw a lot of hills, mountains, snow and trees.













This fork in the road would go East or south and we needed to go East to get to Rotorua. The sculpture is like a giant blanke draped on the rocks, very similar to the blankets the Maori wear at ceremonial occasions.

















In Rotorua, there were a lot of this type of sculpture mounted on the lamposts. The lake is a spiritual place and the area is full of geisers, steaming pools and spas. The population of natives is very high in the North Island, and especially in the northern portion of the island.





















There was a park right beside our lovely hostel. It had steaming pools everywhere. The pools were fenced and the signs indicated that wandering around this place at night was not recommended. It was pretty cold at night, what with the altitude and being inland. We didn't go out much other than for the odd dinner. One night, we went to a "carvery" for dinner, that's a buffet with roast beef, and took in a local drink called Scrumpy, which is alcoholic cider. It;s fizzy and delicious and a bit dangerous. Well, we did have a very good dinner that night!

One of the lovely steaming pools. There was even an area with a shallow rectangular pool that you could soak your feet in but I didn't have a towel on me that day and it was pretty cool to boot... so the boots stayed on!
There was a smell of sulphur on the odd accasion, but we got used to it pretty quickly.







More steam. In some parts of the town, the steam vents pop up into people backyards and become a problem I wonder if some people have had to move out of there home?
Other places with paving stones had steam seeping up and making mineral deposits all over around the venting.











This was a small adjunct building to a large Marai. I'm not sure how they are used. Maybe offerings? The carving on the roof is beautiful If you click in on the image and enlarge, you might be able to see better.














This was the large Marai. It had some wonderful, scary carved faces on it. There is a lot of Paua shell included in the eyes etc. I was lucky that there were no too many tourists to obstruct the view of this mysterious place.














Black swans. They were everywhere. They obviously do very well even in this cool climate. We were warned not to approach and/or feed them as they could be quite nasty. Beauty with a bad temper!













This is a ceremonial canoe. All locked up in its own cage. They don't take it out too often from the looks of it. The carving on it was wonderful. The wood they used was not identified, but the colour was incredible. We were lucky in meeting an elder and chatting with him for quite a while. He was minding an arts centre and was interesting in talking politics of the Aboriginals. They are a very politicized bunch and very determined to preserve and restore their way of life.

This was the Rotorua Museum which had once been a spa in the late 1800's. It was wonderful inside. This is where I discovered Schweppes Lemon lime bitters drink! OMG! I love the stuff. I've bought some Lime cordial, bitters and lemon juice to make it at home!
This is a sculpture near the spa. I loved the curves. I took a lot of pictures of sculptures to show to mu husband. He really likes to see what other people are doing. It looks like patinaed bronze to me , but there are so many new finishes now that it is hard to tell.




















This is the wonder of plants. No sculpture can even come close! This was in a garden beside on of the spa from the 20's . We would be going to to a Maori Hangi for our dinner that night, so we went back to the hostel and lounged about reading. I read a book of short stories by a Saskatchewan writer that I found at the hostel . The story of how the book got there was probably as good as the book was!
Okay, somehow I obliterated the bronze sculpture picture and have not figured out how to undo my edit. I'll include it in my next post.

Aucklands islands, aquariums and onward...

Continuing my visit to Auckland meant that I got to see a lot of civic sculpture. There was a lot of wonderful stuff on offer and I appreciated all of it.















This is really on the way to visit some friends in the country, but I saw it again on the way to Rotorua too. It is a very nice countryside Marai along one of the highways.













From the top of one dead volcano, looking at another dead volcano. Auckland is built on volcanoes and the big bay it is on is probably a caldera of an enormous one.















The inside of an old volcano. The rings are from the cattle that were used as lawnmowers till one attacked a person and they banned them.














A very nice view of suburban Auckland.









The downtown.














We took a ferry out to Waiheke Island, an enclave of the rich. The one half of the island is for housing and the other half is for viniculture and agriculture. Very strictly preserved with native plants regenerated to be as it once was. Other than the grapes and other stuff we humans like to eat!






















The ever present flax plant. Used for weaving and papers.






























The beautiful and strange light of daytime, that seemingly only the camera sees this way. I love it!







A nice cafe where we had a coffee during a little bus tour. We later had lunch of fish and Kumera (sweet potato) chips that some gulls insisted on sharing with us (a la Hitchcock style).












The interior of the local film theatre. This is the way to watch a movie! There was a coffee counter at the back of the theater, with nibbles, baking and sandwiches.













Back in Auckland, I continued to enjoy the green spaces of this city.















The colour too!

















We went to Terry Tarlton's aquarium. It is built using the old sanitation storage tanks where effluence was once ditched into the sea. What a great reuse of this old facility. There were penguins, sharks, stingrays you could go and play with and a huge assortment of other interesting sights.













We were riding in a little train that went around the penguin colony. They kept the room quite cold for the comfort of the animals.













Just as we were about to go out through the doors, a huge killer whale pops up RIGHT beside the train car. It worked at getting the screams out of all of us!












This is one of the stingrays resting.


















A giant preserved squid. My sister's back is used for scale.














This is a turtle that was recovering from an injury and was being returned to the sea when it was well.














This turtle was not so well and just preserved forever in acrylic.















The inside of the underwater tunnel experience. The walls of glass are three inches thick.















Displays of corals were wonderful. I even got to see seahorses!















One day, we went to a market and saw these yams. The colour was so fantastic.