Updates on a couple of things

A couple of updates...

1) Recall that in Rotorua, Julie and I went to the Tamaki Maori Village. It was an enlightening cultural experience, though, compared with the other one I went to (and just by its own lights), it seemed a little...hard to find the right word...forced. It's not that it's exploitative, at least not in any obvious sense, but turning ordinary culture into a show always sets off the warning alarm. Anyway, despite that, the culture is unquestionably something to be taken very seriously. And I suppose that for non-Kiwis it might be easy to think that it is a window onto a past culture or something. But it's not. It's a very live culture.

On that front, last night I saw a news story about the Tamaki Maori Village. It turns out that last year, a Dutch tourist smiled at one of the performers during the welcome ceremony. That (as they instructed us before it began) is considered not only very rude, but actually hostile. The point of the welcome ceremony is, in part, to assess the visitors' hostility, and smiling is considered disrespectful. As a result, the performer in question (who has since been fired, but who avoided serious criminal penalty, given the need to respect Maori cultural norms), headbutted the tourist, breaking his nose and giving him two black eyes.

Just in case you thought it was gimmicky or something.

2) On the topic of serious stuff, one thing I didn't mention about the Tongariro Crossing (see Part I, Part II, and Part III) was the temperature variation. It started out as a very hot hike, and we had the sweat to prove it. By the time we reached the peak, however, it was freezing. In fact, by the end of lunch at the Emerald Lakes (part III), we were a bit worried that Julie's body temp was dropping too fast, so we quickly got back on the trail. Bringing a serious amount of layers is a must.

A related sad story I just heard about was that during the same week that we were on the Crossing, a man died up there. There are a lot of ways to die there--it's got a lot of steep dropoffs and sharp rocks. But this guy died from simple exposure. It can be very cold up there.