Sunday 22nd – Monday 23rd January
We arrive in Rotorua about 6pm and check into Base Hostel. Now up until this moment I have been happy with the hostels in NZ, however when we check in this place our room is literally like something straight out of Shameless!! Just awful and quite possibly my worst hostel for the entire trip…!
Once I am over my rant about hostels we just grab some food and a few drinks and have a fairly early night as it had been such a long day.
Monday morning we just chill out. Not much to do in Rotorua so we just catch up on some much needed sleep then pop out to grab a coffee and lie by the lake soaking up with sun.
At 7pm we are picked up and taken to the Tamaki Maroi Village which is based in the Tawa Forest.
Once we arrive we are all lined up and greeted in the traditional Maroi way. Three men from our buses are chosen as our “Chiefs” and they have to stand and meet the Maroi Chief before we can all enter their village.
Obviously this is all set up for tourists but it was a great insight into their lifestyle and understanding their heritage. They had lots of small huts to explain the various activities that would take place in their villages, one of which is a stick game. Helen and I got pulled out the group to take part – I won!!
After going round the little village they put on a show explaining their heritage and for the end dance they do the Haka, which was great to see!
We are then fed the most delicious buffet, all of which was made the traditional way in a “Hangi Pit” which uses hot thermal stones and all the food is cooked underground in a large man made pit. And the table of backpackers certainly got their fill J
It was a great evening, and so glad I went and learnt more about the Maroi life – Kia Ora J
When we got dropped back at the hostel, Helen and I met up with a few other girls from the trip and entered the pub quiz and won!! My age and knowledge of 90’s pop music definitely came in useful! For once I had something over all the 19 year olds ;-)
We are being picked up at 10am tomorrow to head to Auckland – my last stop!!
No comments:
Post a Comment