Forked out some dough for an evening of fine food, theater, and nature as guests of New Zealand's native people, the Maori. Our night started in a large fine-dining room in Te Puia, with two long buffets piled high with steaming Maori staples from land and sea, much of it slow-cooked for hours in underground ovens, while overlooking a mineral mountain geyser rivalling anything you might find in Yellowstone.
At meal's end, a late twenty-something historian with the looks of a Hollywood professor, dressed in a sheepskin cloak and flanked by the meal's chefs, invited the room to the front courtyard, where he narrated an in-depth, humor-filled history and culture of the Maori people. Like the best of teachers, he quickly immersed the crowd in the topic by asking us to pick a chief who could accept a token of peace from a group of fierce looking warriors who had poured out of a large A-Framed Polynesian meeting house a hundred yards beyond. Twirling war sticks around bare barrel chests as they appeared, they then stood at attention as our crew annointed our chief and sent him walking to accept the war club a warrior had laid on the ground halfway between us and them. With that we were invited in.
The historian was now on stage in formation with the other warriors - men and women - sheepskin now hung in some hidden 21st Century changing room, revealing 18th century tattoos inked the full circumference of his chisseled bronze torso. They began with the Haka of course. Eyes buldging, tongues unrolled past their chins, stomping toward the audience in a floor rattling cadence. A peacock maneuever designed to cower a potential adversary before the actual commencement of war. Despite it's place on a modern stage, it was still terrifying.
And then they smiled. And the theater kicked into a good-humored, barrel-lunged opera, interspersed with history lessons, accented by two warriors in the background with accoustic guitars, who provided the soundtrack for various Maori stories by plucking intro riffs from Richie Valens and Metallica. The show ended with another quick haka and then a thirty-something with long curly hair, black formal dress, complete with Doc Martins and Peacoat, stood up to explain the evening.
"We hope you enjoyed dinner and the show. We've been playing this game since 1874, folks. We're well aware that other indigenous folks, in places like Australia and North America, were near wiped out. We're much luckier. We're 15% of New Zealand's population. We share a lot of power, and the money you paid for dinner and this show pays for the scholarships that send our young people here to study our culture. Now... Who wants to take a hike to watch a geyser?"
The biggest geyser in the Southern Hemisphere to be exact. Atop a cascading mineral mountain that looks something like if you perched Old Faithful on top of Mammoth Springs at Yellowstone. We climbed the steaming hill with our new guide and sat on wide stone bleacher seats super heated by the boiling water in the rock below, which made for a comfortable lounge in the cooling late evening air. "So... 20 or so minutes of nothing, 20 or so minutes of what sounds like a gurgling symphony, then 20 or so minutes of an eruption that can take all kinds of forms. If it's a big one, the water could blow this way. My advice is move quick. We have a saying here that you're not from Te Puia unless you have a burn scar. So if you want to become a local, keep your seat!"
As silent steam transitioned to gurgling underground orchestra, with peacoat now unbuttoned in the gathering steam, our guide shared that the local Maori tribe had settled here a few centuries before British arrival, "cause, you know, it's kinda convenient to fish from a stream right next to where you can boil dinner. We heated our houses with the water you hear gurgling beneath us and lived across this valley as a lovably dysfunctional family. When the British arrived we became quite good at trench warfare. We didn't win the war, but by fortifying this hill, we won a treaty that, while not enforced at first, has since allowed us to maintain this land and a firm place in New Zealand's national culture. Now... let's see what else can I share as I'm not sure when this thing is actually gonna blow..."
And at about that moment, it blew. Thicker than Old Faithful and darn near as high. Tens of thousands of gallons of scalding hot water. We shifted our seats to let the locals maintain their burn rights and watched an eruption that lasted a good twenty minutes as the steam billowed more brightly against the darkening night air. As we exited to the parking lot below, every Maori we passed, from groundskeeper to bathroom cleaners, shared a warm nod, making it clear we were welcomed participants in a pretty special shared experience. As we drove through the greater town of Rotorua, geothermal pools steaming in random neighborhood's backyards, among houses that would be right at home in some weathered but well-kept American neighborhood, with McDonald's, Wendy's and family-owned Mexican and Thai joints on main street just a few miles down the road, it all felt both novel and warmly familiar - with me imagining many middle class communities in say Athens, Georgia or Syracuse, New York, filled with thriving Cherokee or Iroqouis. Last night we were in a parallel universe - so similar yet different from our American own.
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