After a nice warm sleep last night with our under-soil heating, we were up and out and about in Rotorua. Many of the places here seem to offer the same thing, with guided tours of either Maori settlements or thermal parks. We found the one place that combined the two: Whakarewarewa Thermal Village. The local Maori had set up their village right next to a geyser and some thermal springs. This is the one thing that confuses me about Rotorua as a whole: why set up a town right in the middle of a volcanic crater that still has lots of volcanic activity? They must be on to a good thing because the place is apparently full of tourists pretty much all year round.

Anyways, we were guided around the village by a nice old lady who seemed to know every resident, and told how the Maoris use the thermal vents for cooking etc. The nearby geyser went off after the tour, and we were free to walk around and explore before the 'culture show' in the afternoon. There were a few Maoris in national dress doing the Haka, singing some songs etc, but the highlight of the show for me was this little dude in the blue dress that you can see in the photos. Not only was he the only ginger Maori I have ever seen, but he really didn't have a clue as to what was going on. It was like he had been pulled from the crowd and stood up there as a forfeit or something like that. I also spent some time trying to work out if it was a boy or a girl. After much deliberation, I decided it was a boy (or a really ugly girl).

We went back to our campsite in the evening for a few beers and a BBQ. The campsite really did have everything, I was very impressed. We also made our own 'Hangi'. There are two ways of cooking a 'Hangi': One is by heating up lots of rocks in the ground and then putting your food into a whole and covering it to cook it. The other, mainly for the thermal areas, is to let the heat in the ground boil up some water into steam and then steam your food. We had the latter, so made some steamed silverbeet (kind of like a cross between celery, cabbage and lettuce) and sweet potato to go with our burgers - very yummy indeed!

-B