ROTORUA, NEW ZEALAND

ROTORUA, NZ

We arrived at Rotorua International Airport aboard a shaky twin engine prop piloted by a blue eyed, blonde sweetie that looked young enough to still be in high school. The flight line attendants rolled up a set of stairs for us to exit from the door abruptly behind the pilot. When we boarded in Auckland, there was no such thing as a security check, although they took our boarding passes. There was no metal detector, nude photo scanner, frisking or profiling. There was no walkway ramp that dumped you into the side door of this baby plane. Instead, we walked down a flight of stairs directly onto the Tarmac and out to the waiting plane. The stairway to the side plane door was so close to the Prop that I could have reached out and touched it! Fortunately, the engines were shut down at the time!

Rotorua International is a tiny airport, totally uncrowded with only a few steps from the Tarmac to the street. Debby made her way over to waiting Taxis and shuttles only to find out the cost to our resort, about 9 km away, would cost $35 instead of the $20 the resort info told us. So we bit.

Upon arrival we discovered the lakeside resort was a little different than we anticipated. There was no resort shuttle for us to use; we were $35 away from the airport, 4-5 km from the nearest tiny store, and $60 away from downtown Rotorua, and $60 more back to our Worldmark Resort. As we began to do the math to cover the next 5 days of running around, not to mention, SIGHTSEEING, we decided to rent a car and take our chances driving on the opposite side of the road. We got hold of Thrifty Car Rental and struck a deal on a compact Hyundai.

The next morning a young lady arrived at our door promptly at 0900 to pick us up and take us to the airport. Ron and I signed up as designated drivers and paid our $400 for 5 days' rental. Ron took the wheel and got us home, where we picked up a couple of familiar girls and drove into Rotorua to see the sights.

Rotorua is a quaint little town with many empty shops about. As a local coffee and sandwich shop keeper told us, quite a few businesses have moved their business down the way to a local Mall. We did manage to go to that Mall and check it out. It is quite large and contains a food court that we promptly explored and stuffed our faces!

We visited a local park. It was not your normal city park by any means. This area abounds in geothermal activity, especially this park! We thoroughly enjoyed walking about and seeing the bubbling mud bogs and steaming ponds, not to mention the sharp odor of sulphur in the air! Rotorua is a hotbed of geothermal heat, belching steam, mud and sulphur all over the place! A couple of businesses like the Polynesian Spa have harness this amazing energy and created bath houses with varying temperatures of bathing pools, both public and private, where singles, couples and families can relax in a strong mineral bath where stress, pain and anxiety melts away like summer snow. We didn't have time to try it out as we needed to head over to do some grocery shopping before our evening excursion in a couple of hours.

Our evenings event was a trip to the MITAI MAORI VILLAGE. For $100/each we were treated to a great dinner of hot coal baked Lamb, Chicken, potatoes and many other side dishes. The main event was a Maori Cultural show put on by young Maori's working to keep the the old culture alive while living in the modern world. Our traveling companions, well....... RON in particular, was singled out of the crowd of more than 250 people to be our Chief and represent us before the great Maori Chief. It included a speech on behalf of his tribe to the Maori Chief that we come in peace and appreciate his hospitality, along with the traditional "nose touching" greeting of friendship. It was a lot of fun and Nancy and I have home videos as proof! Hopefully we will be able to sell these videos back to Chief Ron to keep them off of Face Book or You Tube! If not, you may get to see them!

We also took a walk Into the night to visit the habitat of the amazing Glow Worms along he creek. I guess they were amazing to see. I don't see very well anymore so I couldn't tell how wonderful they were.

We were dropped off back at the condo by our retired driver, who talked and sang songs all the way back, for our listening pleasure.

It's all good!