A new car, hotsprings, and a brief but insightful look at the Maori language.

Spooti tahooti rama rama ding dong. That’s Maori for absolutely nothing.

So, a lot has happened since my last update. We acquired our used car. It’s a Toyota Corona, like the beer. It’s 1990. 18 years old, baby. No anti-lock breaks, no airbags, no power steering, and certainly no CD player. Let me back up to the third item, though. No power steering. Some of my older readers are probably familiar with this, but for the rest of you let me explain what that means: it means you have to steer a two ton hunk of metal with nothing but your own arm strength and a greasy steering wheel. Yes, it’s as awesome as it sounds.

It took about an hour to get comfortable with driving on the left, and as for the lack of power steering, it will probably take about the whole year to get used to that. Other than that, driving here is actually quite fun. The speed limits are high and the views are amazing. I literally wanted to pull over to take pictures every 2-3minutes. If I did that, though, we’d never make it anywhere.

Now we’re in Rotorua, a town on the way to Wellington. We realized that we weren’t spending our money fast enough so we decided to come here and spend it on all sorts of wonderful things like parks, hot springs, and petrol (that’s gas). Petrol is really expensive. Really, really expensive. I don’t want to hear any complaining about gas prices in the States as long as I’m here. What I do want to hear is, “Hey Eoin, here’s some money for petrol!”

But seriously, Rotorua is a cool area. The geothermal activity has made the landscape unlike anything I've seen before. The area is filled with geysers, hot springs, lakes that are unusual colors due to their chemical composition, and other things like that. As an added bonus, the whole area has the delicious sulphury smell of rotten eggs.

I’ll let pictures do the rest of my talking for me. Tomorrow we’re continuing on towards Wellington. Until then, take care. Or as the Maori say, “Rahiti rahiti smell my feety.”

Okay, they don’t really say that. Anyway, on with the pictures.

Mount Tarawera, the volcano that erupted in 1886 and buried the town of Te Wairo:



A couple cool pictures from the geothermal park we went to, Wai-O-Tapu:




(Once I have more online time I’ll create an online photo album, so there will be a lot more of these. I just don’t want to bog down my blog with a bunch of photos).