New Year's Day with friends

Saturday, January 2, 2010  Tauranga to Rotorua

We spent Thursday and Friday nights with friends who live in a wonderful country place right out on the tip of a finger peninsula that sticks into Tauranga Harbour.  They have built a beautiful and extensive garden, and the weather was just wonderful.  He was a professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois, where Tyler did his graduate study, and, being originally from NZ, they decided to retire to here a few years ago.  So we travelled, what? - 12,000 miles - to spend a couple of days with some folks from Illinois!  They even put up a US flag to welcome us!

Here is sunrise over their garden:

On Saturday we drove southwest to the geothermal area of Rotorua, a medium size city on the edge of a sulfurous lake in a volcanic caldera.  They would like you to think of this as the Yellowstone of the Southern Hemisphere, but if you have seen Yellowstone you won't be much impressed by the geothermal features around Rotorua.  It is, however, much visited, and is also home to the largest concentration of Mauris in New Zealand.  There is a very informative and impressive center of Mauri culture at the nearby Te Puia, which we first visited as a day excursion from our tour boat a couple of weeks ago.  Among other attractions, they have institutes teaching Mauri wood carving and textile weaving, keeping alive these highly developed skilled traditions.

One highlight of the trip from Tauranga was our tour of the Kiwi 360 attraction.  It is a combination of a large working commercial kiwifruit orchard, a cafe, a visitors center, and tours.  The kiwifruit business is very important to New Zealand, and the climate in this area is ideal for productivity.  As they informed us endlessly during the tour, kiwifruit has been declared the most nutritious of all fruits.  And most of this development has been just in the past 30 years, although the beginnings go back to before World War II.