After Wellington Gardens, we should have known it had to go downhill, and I’m not talking about the road or topography. Every trip has some days when it ain’t all sunshine and roses—maybe you have car trouble, or someone gets sick, or you get hopelessly lost. In our case, I think it was just a matter of being spoiled, and we just weren’t in the right mood. Up until that sunny May day, every place we had visited had been out of this world, so when the scenery and sites returned to normalcy, we started whining. But when I look back at that day, it really wasn’t all that bad.
We drove southeast for about an hour on the East Coast Road through lumpy farmland smothered with cattle in the Waikato region of New Zealand’s North Island. Our destination was the township of Te Aroha. The town is one of the country’s top tourist spots, celebrated for its naturally hot soda waters, spas, and the Mokena Geyser. It is also one of the spiritual centers of Māori culture and religion.
At this point, we started to notice the differences between the area north of Auckland and the landscape and people in the south. The south is flatter, drier, browner, more obsessed with celebrating the native Māori, and noticeably less friendly.
Te Aroha was nothing special, a bland assortment of dusty stores along a tired-looking, baked grey Center Street with a Māori sculpture prominently displayed in a traffic circle; a towering War Memorial; and the rather rundown Springs Hotel, dating back to the town’s glory days. And everything was in need of a paint job.
We stopped at the red roof Visitor Center, where a very chatty greeter informed us that Te Aroha was “the birthplace of tourism in New Zealand.” It was New Zealand’s preeminent spa town back in the 1800s, and rich, white Kiwis flocked to the place so they could socialize together while stewing in the healing mineral hot springs and pools. The Te Aroha Mineral Spas, right next to the historic train station, are still a major touron attraction.
Te Aroha is Māori for “The Love” or “The Compassion.” We didn’t really catch that vibe, but it’s a nice thought. I guess.
A 3,000-foot-tall green snowcone mountain looms over downtown like a jungle backstop. Te Aroha anchors a lush, forested mountain chain that begins just behind the city and runs due south for many miles.
Te Aroha is an active volcanic zone with hot springs, Māori boogedy boo, and the largest concentration of Victorian and Edwardian architecture in New Zealand (which sounds a lot better than it looks). It reminded me of an old postcard.
After spending less than an hour walking around Te Aroha, and getting a good chuckle when we finally found the well-hidden and barely sputtering Mokena geyser (the world’s only hot soda water geyser) with its goofy white garbage can lid, we drove south for another 1.5-hours through industrial Dairyland littered with “Livestock Effluent Disposal Sites” where they allow stock trucks to empty their effluent tanks safely and conveniently. These sites are located on major transport routes to help prevent pollution. I will let your imagination do the rest.
New Zealand produces an ungodly amount of cow shit. I have never seen so many cows in my life, not even at the Oklahoma and Texas stockyards. The farmers will cram several hundred cows on a grassy plot no bigger than a football field. It’s like Cow Woodstock everywhere you go. Industrial dairy factories are producing vast quantities of milk and cheese in almost every small town.
Our final destination was Rotorua, considered the heartland of New Zealand’s Māori culture and the spiritual home of New Zealand’s tangata whenua (original people of the land).
Every New Zealand travel blog, every YouTube travel video, every touron brochure, tells you to visit Rotorua. They don’t tell you that it stinks to high heaven of sulfur. The whole town. Every minute of the day and night. Like death warmed over.
Rotorua is located in the caldera of a volcano that last blew its top in 1886. The mother volcano erupted about 200,000 years ago. There are hundreds of mini-rhyolite, grass-covered volcanoes popping up in the rolling pastures as you climb toward the rims of the massive volcano. And the northern rim of the volcano is attached to the mountain range that started way back in Te Aroha, where we had recently visited. It’s not hard to see why the Māori found the land spiritually alive.
The Māori have a golden goose legend that explains the 1886 eruption. The area around Rotorua was once covered in pink and white volcanic terraces that were considered the Eighth Wonder of the World. The Māori started charging the Europeans to see this natural wonder. After a while, the spiritual leaders said this was corrupting the people, and they needed to stop charging people to see nature’s beauty. But the warning was ignored, and the volcano then blew its top and destroyed all the pretty stone terraces.
Rotorua sits on the fetid shores of a shallow, silvery-brown lake filled with small, bubbling geysers and mobbed with noisy bird gangs. It’s called Lake Rotorua—or as I began calling it, “Stinkpot Junction”. It was a fun place to watch the Chinese tourons get off the bus and test to see if the geyser water was hot. It was! They would huddle around a geyser, hesitantly touch the bubbling water like it might bite, and then reel backwards in alarm when it did. I sat at dawn on a bench and never tired of the show. At one point, five different groups were performing the same act. It was a hoot.
There are mountain trails in every direction around town leading to dense tropical forests and stunning mountain views of the caldera. And there are an abundance of amusement park attractions like Zombieland, Skyline Rotorua, Velocity Valley, Zorn Downhill Ball Rolling, the Hell’s Gate Geothermal Mud Spa, the Māori Cultural Experience, the World Famous Agrodome, the Shweeb pedal-powered track ride, river rafting, go karts, and spas galore. Basically, it’s Outdoor Playland Central, a sort of Kiwi Disneyland, and fun for the whole family … with a very funky smell.
After doing several loads of laundry at our hotel, we drove north out of town for about twenty minutes and then hiked around Okere Falls on the Okauia fault line which turns the narrow Okere River into a turquoise torrent of Class 5 cascades where we watched several kayaks launch and flip upside down as they nosedived into two churning Maytag rapids at the bottom of 20-feet-tall waterfalls that came blasting out of the jungle like water jets. It was very amusing and fun was had by all.
We hiked a few miles along the very pleasant Wairere Falls Loop Trail before returning to town and heading over to the Polynesian Spa, where we soaked for an hour or so in several 110-degree acid and mineral geothermal baths at the edge of Lake Rotorua.
Local Māori bathed for centuries in the acidic pool ‘Te Pupunitanga’, now called Priest’s Bath. It has always been a popular place to marinate.
The European bathing history at Polynesian Spa began in 1878, when a Catholic Priest named Father Mahoney bathed regularly in the thermal spring water of hand-dug pools where the Polynesian Spa now sits. He claimed it cured his arthritis, and the first bath house was built in 1882. Over the years, the government attempted to operate the baths, but they burned down. However, the establishment underwent a Renaissance when the local Ward family renovated the place in the 1930s, and a few royals from England dropped in for a therapeutic soak. In 1972, the government of the day leased the Ward Baths to Polynesian Pools Limited, and the spa is now known as the Polynesian Spa.
Rotorua was a good place to lay low, recharge, take care of some basic housekeeping, and soak our weary bones in the stinky water. That said, we could have foregone what was a fairly long drive to get there and undoubtedly had more fun staying a few extra days in the Bay of Islands.
