We woke to bright sunlight, which made a nice change. What a shame that the sun waited almost until the day of our departure before showing its face again. After breakfast (on the deck again) we packed and set off for Tauronga. We wanted to find a place called The Historic Village, but I didn't have a good map of the town so was forced to rely on signs. And there weren't any! We found ourselves on the expressway, with no signs even for the city centre. We drove through the industrial area and Port Tauronga, neither of which was very attractive, and eventually headed for Mount Maunganui, which is both a town and a mountain. The mountain is the cone of an extinct volcano. The town is on a long sand spit leading up to the mountain, and has a beach on both sides.
This is the side that faces east, into Tauronga Harbour. The beach here is long, calm and sheltered, and very quiet, as you can see. There are lots of boats as well; this would appear to be the side favoured by the sailors.
The spit is quite narrow so the town itself is long and narrow, only a couple of blocks wide at the foot of the mountain. If you drive across to the west side, the beach is even more beautiful, but quite different.
This is a surf beach, and very popular indeed with surfers. It has about 10 km of very pale beige sand, and there were people surfing all the way along it. It was impossible to find a parking space near the mountain, though there were plenty of empty spaces about half a mile down the beach. Paul got into conversation with a man from England who was visiting his son who had moved here from England. He said when he looked at the weather and the life-style, he could understand why his son preferred this spot to Birmingham, where he used to live.
We were tempted again by the beautiful beach, but once again could not find any public facilities, so we gave up and had another go at finding the Historic Village. This was difficult, because there were no signs to it at all, but eventually I found it. This was mostly because I happened to notice we were driving past 1st Avenue, and its address is 17th Avenue, so we just kept going until we got to 17. I cannot imagine why there are no signs to it. I only knew about it because I saw a tiny advertisement for it in a magazine about the area. Perhaps they don't want tourists to visit - there were certainly very few there, and I wondered how the shops survived with hardly any customers.
The village is a collection of original and replica buildings taken from early Tauranga and set in a village setting.
Many of the buildings are home to local and national community organisations, which I suppose could be why they don't want to market themselves to tourists. Some of the buildings are the studios of local artists, with classes and workshops available, which again are not appropriate for tourists. But I can't imagine how anybody makes a living when the shops have so few customers.
We wandered around for ages admiring the old buildings. I think there may be as many as 70, and I seem to have photographed most of them.
The church was beautiful, though rather hard to photograph, since it is almost completely surrounded by trees.
The church is a composite of several buildings, much of the interior being taken from the private chapel of a converted Maori chief. After his death, the rest of his tribe were not interested in Christianity, and so the decorated rafters and blue panels were given to this church.
This is my best photo of the interior. And yes, that is a woman lying on the floor where the altar ought to be. She lay there for ages photographing the ceiling, and by the time she went, the light wasn't so good.
There was only one building I could find with a historical display inside, the Blacksmith and Wheelwright.
We ate our lunch at a picnic table in wonderful surroundings
but then we spent so long in conversation with the woman in the gem shop that we realised it was past time to leave, or we wouldn't get to Rotorua in time to have another museum visit.
So we set off through steep volcanic hills and a couple of deep gorges. We would have liked to stop for photos, but once again the roads were narrow and twisty, and even driving slowly was dangerous as other road users were liable to be right on your back bumper. Paul kept finding places to pull over to let them pass, but as soon as they were gone, their place was taken by somebody else.
Once we arrived, it was not hard to find the Museum again, and we were able to go and see the bits about the original use of the building, as a spa. This was most interesting, not to say worrying. Invalids of various sorts were encouraged to go there for various baths and other treatments. The waters were felt to be particularly good for rheumatism, gout and arthritis, as well as constipation, obesity, skin and digestive complaints, and various nervous ailments. Talk about a cure-all! It all sounds a bit like snake oil.
You could bathe in the health-giving waters - note the steps to help you get into the bath
or you could have a mud bath
Apparently, all this was very popular. The Baths regularly gave from 60-80 thousand baths a year, and about 30 thousand other treatments. People came to Rotorua for two or three weeks, once or twice a year. Some of the treatments were just massages or special showers. Some sounded awful, involving electric currents being passed through the water. Some involved steaming (somebody commented it was akin to making a person into a hangi; this is a Maori method of steaming food in an earth oven) One awful treatment involved using electricity to heat a rheumatic joint to 300 degrees or more. I would call this cooking, rather than heating.
Towels were very important. You spent some time after your treatment relaxing wrapped in towels, then you dressed and went to spend an hour in the Cooling Room, where you were out of draughts and could cool down gradually.
I went up onto the viewing platform on the roof for a view over Rotorua. This is a view over the town, with the Blue Baths, built in 1915, on the left of the picture, between the two palm trees and partly obscured by one of them.
In the other direction, you can just see Lake Rotorua.
In both pictures, you can see the jolly little decorative turrets. Guidebooks go on about the 'Tudor Style' but I believe when I first saw it I remarked that it looked more Bavarian to me. Sure enough, when I found the section on the building, I found a quotation that it should imitate 'the homely timber buildings of Nauheim (Germany), rather than 'the cold glory of English marble palaces.' I am delighted to have been proved right.
As we were quite tired, we sat down to watch a film we had wanted to see before, about the Maori Battalion in the last war. It was something we knew little about, so we felt we had improved our knowledge a bit.
As it was after 5, we went off to look for somewhere to stay, and are now conveniently in the centre of town. Supper was simple, there was a Thursday Night Market with lots of food stalls. Tomorrow, we have to make our way back to Auckland to return the car on Saturday morning and then catch the plane to Fiji and Samoa.
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