We are in Rotorua. It’s a strange place. A nothing town again, though less so than Taupo, as it seems more of a tourist town, with lots of souvenir and travel shops including a set of horrific ones catering to visits to Hobbiton. Our bed and breakfast is quite splendid. It’s a small old house, immaculately clean, and owned by a photographer who takes rather gothic award-winning portraits. There is a lovely heavy-framed portrait of her daughter in the living room, dressed in a black Victorian dress with a Maori tattoo below the lip. The owner herself is not around and the place is being managed by friends, a delightful Maori woman and her pakeha husband, both of whom are supremely relaxed and she at least is very light-humoured and interesting (I haven’t spoken much to him). We went for a walk through the town’s parks which are studded with fumaroles and hot springs, so are covered in smoke and the entire town smells of sulphur. What a very strange place to live. There are parts of town where many of the houses seem to have a smoking hole into the underworld in the front gardens, and there is a Maori settlement with a church that is wreathed in smoke like something from hell. We walked along the lake and watched water planes take off, always a pleasure, and then through Sulphur Point, a promontory into the lake that is a bird reserve and, of course, fizzes and hisses and steams and smells of spoiled eggs.
Our final stop was to a supermarket as we have decided to cook at home as much as possible, New Zealand food being expensive and rather of the meat-and-two-veg variety. This proved an error on two counts. First, as we trudged back with our shopping we found the same supermarket a couple of streets away from the Airbnb. And second, it later turned out that there was a night market on at the same time that actually did have high quality local produce and delicatessen wares.