Student Bloggers

In four days, it's impossible to gain a real understanding of a country. But you can collect pebble-sized samples of experiences, and put some into your pocket to take out and build upon on down the road. That was the idea of Orientation with Arcadia, and it was an absolute blast.

In four days, we swept through most of New Zealand's north island from Auckland to Rotorua, and sampled some of New Zealand's finest, hottest and gnarliest. The trip felt like a montage of quick polaroid snapshots, a different scene each moment that became a blur of brilliant green farmland through the tour bus window, bubbling geysers and rainbow pools, Maori chants and a pyramid of sheep.

My second morning in Auckland, I was treated to a massive upgrade in accommodation by moving over to the International Kiwi Hotel, a relatively fancy establishment near University of Auckland with fancy double rooms and a fifteen dollar continental breakfast. The Arcadia group swarmed into the lobby at 9am that morning, catalyzing a haze of handshakes, new faces, forgotten names and excited smalltalk that would last the next several days.

Our time in Auckland was brief – we took a walking tour of the city, weaving through urban parks, the University, and down to the piers. We climbed into green rolling hills reminiscent of the Shire above the coastline for a spectacular view of the Auckland skyline. With the sky tower, Auckland's version of the space needle, slicing through the high-rises, the city could have been Seattle. We bussed to a beach for a swim, and it wasn't until I was a few hundred meters from shore that someone told me Great White Sharks breed at that particular beach. Apparently the government tags the sharks soon after they're found and track them, warning swimmers at a sighting, but it's still a pretty nerve wracking fact to learn in the act of treading water.

On the third day we drove a few hours south to Rotorua—New Zealand’s tourism capital—to a land of underground streams of lava, ballistic war dances, hissing yellow pools of sulfuric acid and magical Maori woodland communities.

Rotorua stinks of sulfur—a product of the volcanic activity in the region—but the mobs of tourists flocking into town prove that the city’s beauty and intrigue outweighs the smell. The city was built in an active volcanic field, and in many places, the ground is scourged by subterranean streams of lava that feed natural hot springs, geysers and bubbling mud pools. Our hotel sat at the rim of a volcanic crater that erupted for the last time around 240,000 years ago. With that final blow the magma chamber beneath the volcano collapsed, leaving a circular depression or caldera that’s since become a vast blue lake. In the middle is a luscious green volcanic island like a giant mossy turtle tucked into its shell; across the water are rolling golden hills reminiscent of the central California coast.

Some beaches on Lake Rotorua are harmless white sand, and in other spots, crevasses and pits gape and spit boiling sulfur-choked water. I saw one Chinese tourist boiling a giant sack of eggs in one of these pits—maybe the stench of sulfur isn’t as noticeable when you’re eating a hard-boiled egg. On our first evening, we took advantage of Lake Rotorua’s geothermal currents with a night time soak in the “Polynesian spa”, a luxurious complex of natural lakeside hot tubs surrounded by lush tropical vegetation.

The next day we previewed the best of New Zealand’s flora and fauna. The island of New Zealand broke off from the super-continent Gondwana millions of years ago, before mammals evolved, so, at first, New Zealand was populated only by birds. Since the birds didn’t have ground dwelling predators, many, including the kiwi, evolved to be flightless. When the Maori and Europeans immigrated to the island they brought along mammals that now prey on the kiwi and other flightless birds, rendering them endangered. Today kiwis are hard to spot in the wild, but we got to pay them a visit at an eco park where they’re hatched in giant terrariums full of tropical ferns. To my surprise, kiwi birds aren’t the size of a kiwi fruit, and look more like giant, scuffling rodents than birds.

We checked out Rotorua’s famous geyser, Lady Knox, next. It doesn’t erupt at a specific time like Old Faithful, but for a show, the tour guide poured eco-friendly soap down the geyser’s throat and it erupted like a volcano. We hiked around the geologic park and visited steaming rainbow lakes of boiling hot water in vibrant greens, turquoises, yellows and reds. This mini Yellowstone was christened a “wonderland” by European explorers and was sacred to the Maori, who buried their stillborn amongst the trees there. The Maori also tapped into the geothermal activity to heat their water, and used the volcanic rocks to heat food cooked in underground pits.

The Maori culture is actually a branch off of Polynesian culture; the Polynesians are the most widely dispersed peoples on the planet, sprinkled throughout the Pacific from Hawaii to Easter Island to New Zealand. They came to the island at the bottom of the world via outrigger canoe and eventually divided the island into regions owned by tribes. The Maori were nomadic, and at the beginning, they exploited the slow, lumbering land based birds, becoming their first predators. They were warlike, and never considered themselves a cohesive community of peoples, rather distinct tribes in competition with one another. 

In the 17th century Australia was being settled by convicts from the UK, and once they formed a proper community they started trading with the Maori – lumber for guns. The introduction of guns to the Maori's already warlike culture turned a controlled flame into a wildfire, and a good percentage of the Maori peoples actually killed each other. Missionaries appeared in New Zealand around 1840, and they created the Treaty of Waitangi with the Maori people, giving them possession of all land, forest and fisheries. Of course, the treaty did not last long. It's a familiar story – Europeans flooded into New Zealand and claimed more land, the Maori peoples were nearly obliterated by foreign disease, war broke out, the Europeans created bunkers in Auckland to ward off the natives. 

Yikes. Luckily, like in the US, the 60's and 70's were decades of activism in New Zealand, and there was a massive revival of Maori culture. Now, the country does a far better job than the US at promoting native culture and customs, such as Auckland's portage crossing. At professional rugby games, players both European and Maori perform the haka, the traditional war dance, before kick off.

On our last night in Rotorua, we visited a Maori village. It's a remake of the original villages, but was constructed on the original land, settled partially for its proximity to geothermal heat sources. The village was set in a beautiful forest – we toured the village at sundown, when golden rays pierced through tall pines like soft lasers. Fires burned amongst miniature wooden carvings where Maori dressed in traditional regalia introduced us to traditional cultural activities such as wood carving, dances, weapon making and games. At the end of the tour we were treated to an incredible Maori song and dance performance and a feast of lamb and fish smoked in a hangi, an underground oven.

The next morning our plane took off for Wellington, New Zealand's capital, and then on to Dunedin, our home for the rest of the semester. It was good bye to the volcanoes and jungles of the north island and hello to the snow covered peaks and fjords of the south island, the real Middle Earth. Now time to settle in, drop the tourist persona, and become a real Kiwi.