Tramp Royale (46 page)

New Zealand seems to be a place where no one goes hungry, but where life is dreary and comfortless beyond belief, save for the pleasures of good climate and magnificent countryside.

The bus delivered us at last to Hotel Wairakei, having taken four hours to cover seventy miles. Wairakei is a thermal-activity neighborhood rather than a town; it has geysers, hot springs, boiling mud springs, and colored formations in abundance, and is also the center of the government's experiments in harnessing volcanic steam for heat and power, a project pictured last year in
Life
magazine. The geothermal bores are located near the hotel and the hotel is alleged to be heated by them; perhaps in time heat for hotels will become a common thing there. As yet, the experiments have not realized commercial results but there is every reason to expect that they will. The amount of dry steam underground here is illustrated by one thermal activity which is not duplicated or excelled in Yellowstone (grand as they are, all other thermal activities in New Zealand are no match for Yellowstone, a demonstrable fact no New Zealander will believe). This exception is the Karapiti Blow Hole, which incessantly blows dry steam at 180 lbs./sq. in. pressure and has been doing so without let-up at least since the Maori arrived there in the fourteenth century. The guide there referred to it as "New Zealand's Relief Valve" and suggested that the island might blow up if the blow hole were stopped up-Ticky was all for sneaking back at night and dumping rocks and cement into it, but she is a vandal at heart as well as an anarchist.

Speaking of vandals, our several visits to the geysers and so forth of Wairakei area were made less than pleasant by the New Zealander's own disregard for his country's natural wonders. Even the guides joined in the casual sport of tearing up the vegetation, roiling the lily pools, chucking refuse into hot springs and the like. After the firm discipline of our own National Park Rangers plus the unending and quite successful warnings to us all not to disfigure our parks it was shocking to see these people witlessly damaging their national treasures. Yet we never once heard a government guide protest or warn.

In fact, in the Waitomo Caves we saw one of the guides break off a stalactite (which took endless years to grow) just to show a party of twenty people its inner structure. In these caves the formations were covered with disfiguring chicken wire where they could be reached, just to stop such rape-but the formations in our Carlsbad Caverns have no such protection and need none, for each party that goes down is so indoctrinated before starting that, should a tourist be so reckless as to harm a formation, the Rangers would almost certainly have to intervene to save him from violence at the hands of the outraged majority. We have our vandals, certainly-but we regard them as vermin. Not so there.

This same guide at Waitomo mentioned something else that surprised us almost as much as the destruction of the stalactite. It turned out that Ticky had the only flashlight in the party, whereupon the guide mentioned that the week before the lights had failed and a guide had been forced to lead a party out in the pitch blackness, relying on his memory of the twists and turns underground. Despite this incident, our guide had no torch of any sort. One of the New Zealand tourists remarked that the government certainly should buy him a flashlight, whereupon all the rest of the party and the guide himself agreed solemnly that the government certainly should, as the present situation was dangerous. Ticky and I kept quiet. No one at all suggested that a professional cave guide, not supplied with a free flashlight, might consider investing ten shillings in a flashlight of his own rather than wait for a bureaucrat to think of it.

The Wairakei Hotel had the usual swank lounge and dining room, poor food and lack of service; it was exceptional only in having the smallest room we encountered around the world. It contained a double bed and there was barely room for one person to walk down one side and the end, with the bed jammed against two walls.

We went on from there to Rotorua, fifty miles away. Rotorua is a town built right on top of a thermal area; there are geysers, hot springs, and plumes of steam popping out at odd places in back yards, in parks, or by the roadside. The Wairakei area and Rotorua and its environs comprise most of the thermal area in New Zealand. One gets the impression that thermal activity in New Zealand covers a vast area, much larger than Yellowstone, but this is not true; a map of Yellowstone, to the same scale, placed over a map of New Zealand, will show that the area of thermal activity in Yellowstone is more widespread than the corresponding area in New Zealand. After trying this comparison I wondered why the New Zealand area seemed larger and concluded that it arose from one difference: the New Zealand thermal area is not a reserve, except for certain very small areas of intense activity; farms and houses and villages fill up the space between these very limited enclaves; on the other hand, in Yellowstone we have chosen to block off the entire space, all 3500 square miles of it, more than 2,000,000 acres.

This comparison is not a criticism of the New Zealand policy, as New Zealand simply could not possibly afford to block off an area the size of Yellowstone in the middle of North Island. Besides, while I would not change Yellowstone by one pine needle, nevertheless there is a quaint charm about a country town in which the houses and fruit trees and privies intermingle with geysers and hot springs.

The Hotel Geyser in Rotorua did nothing to sully New Zealand's unchallenged record for the worst in hotels. Our room was larger than the one at Wairakei, but, since it had twin beds, it was not roomier. Since we were going to be there longer than overnight I started to ask for a chair, there being none of any nature in the room, then refrained from doing so after I had considered every possibility and discovered that no jigsaw puzzle maneuvering could possibly make room for a chair in that lovely boudoir.

The mattress on my bed was such that I took it off the bed each night and placed it under the bed. In my opinion this improved things somewhat, as there was a hard boxlike structure under the mattress which seemed to me to make better sleeping than the alleged mattress. Ticky chose to sleep among the hills and valleys of her mattress; I don't know which one of us came out ahead, but we both resorted to sleeping pills every night that we were there. There was no danger of us sleeping through breakfast as a Maori maid came in at seven each morning to wake us with tannic acid solution and another Maori girl toured the corridors, banging on a Maori war gong-allee-samee lid of garbage can, with decorations-at seven-thirty to make sure no one failed to sit down on time. This clamor went on even on Sunday mornings.

We were unable to keep the maid out of the room at seven a.m. because we could not get a key to our room, nor could it be bolted from inside. Immediately after checking in I went back to the desk and made a fight talk for a key, somewhat exaggerating the value of my camera equipment and of Ticky's jewelry to justify the unusual (in New Zealand) request . . . in fact, between camera, binoculars, typewriter, engagement ring, and a few gewgaws, we did have items with us which it would have grieved us to lose.

The manageress told me somewhat frostily that we did not need a key since everyone around there was honest. Right at this point a bellman came up to her, stuck out his hand, and asked for the key to the linen locker; she reached under the desk and got it for him while still talking to me. I looked at him, looked back at her, and said, "I thought you just told me that keys were quite unnecessary around here because everyone was honest?"

This made her angry and she informed me quite huffily that the linen locker was another matter entirely. I did not get the key.

While we were there Ticky took her baths wearing all her jewelry, such as it was. Insurance compensation does not interest her.

Perhaps everyone around there was indeed honest; we did not miss anything. But New Zealand is the only country we visited where we were cheated in making change and it happened there so frequently as to justify fairing a curve and declaring a trend.

The hotel was standard in all other respects. The room had no coat hangers, of course; the food was bad and dirty; the coffee was one point worse than any other, for it was not drinkable at all-and I will happily drink very bad coffee rather than do without; I am a coffee addict. But the meals were rendered somewhat cheerful by Maori waitresses in old Maori costumes, very fancy indeed. The Maori are a handsome people and Maori girls are very pretty indeed, if you like them a little on the plump side. The girls were not only smiling and attractive but actually seemed to want to please the guests. They dressed in a skirt much like a hula skirt made of New Zealand flax, scraped, rolled and dried in such a fashion that the strands look like strings of beads. When they walk the strands make a cheerful clacking sound. Above the waist they wear fancy embroidered bodices, strapless, with arms and shoulders bare.

The Geyser Hotel is almost next door to the Maori village of Whakarewarewa, which sits right in a geyser basin with houses built on the crusts deposited by thermal action. We paid a guide fee and joined a party of four Englishmen who were being shown around by an old Maori woman. The houses in this village are of the same style as almost every other house in New Zealand; they are not Maori architecture. So far as I could find out no Maori lives as his ancestors lived; there seems to be nothing in New Zealand parallel to the pueblo cities and the Navajo hogans of our southwest. But nearby the occupied houses, the Maori have built a replica ancient Maori village for the benefit of tourists; the tour includes the modern village, the thermal activities, and a lecture on Maori culture illustrated by the replica empty village.

The modern village sits where it does because the Maori use the natural steam and hot water for cooking, for washing, and for all domestic purposes. Iron pipes run here and there above ground, carrying water and steam from natural source to houses, and there are boxes and Dutch-oven contrivances placed over steam holes and used as stoves. The heat is great enough for boiling or simmering, not great enough for broiling or frying. Laundering is done outside in natural basins and the children, at least, bathe outdoors. I had the impression that this method of living was continued primarily as a tourist exhibit even though the houses really are inhabited, but it is no more the normal way for Maori to live than it is for the whites. The overwhelming majority of Maori have no more opportunity to use natural steam than have the residents of Auckland. Nevertheless it was very interesting.

We left the village and were conducted around the rest of the geyser basin and over to the replica village. We had had the bad luck to draw a guide who was intensely racist; she was bent on proving that Maori were equal to white men in most ways and better in all others. While we could sympathize with her chip-on-the-shoulder attitude intellectually, it was nevertheless tediously annoying. I am not going to give this woman's name as she has had much too much publicity already, being conceded to be the leading guide there and the one always chosen to conduct V.I.P.s-you have probably seen her picture in American magazines several times.

When we joined her party she was busy baiting the four Englishmen, making invidious comparisons between Maori and English, criticizing the government of England, and so forth. The Englishmen endured it in dignified silence. When she found out that we were Americans she shifted her attention to us, but limited herself at first to boasting about how much the village had done for American service men during the War (which may well have been true) and how thoroughly impressed "Eleanor" was with what she had seen there.

A few minutes later I accidentally brought her wrath down on us. She had asked us if we had seen Yellowstone Park; we admitted that we had. She answered, "I'll show you things you don't have at Yellowstone." Shortly thereafter, during the geyser basin tour, she stopped and pointed around us. "Note," she said, "how the greenery, the trees and bushes, come right down to the edge of the geyser basin. There's nothing like that in Yellowstone."

This was a wonderful place for me to have kept my mouth shut in the interests of international amity. But I answered, "Excuse me, but somebody has misled you. The trees and greenery in Yellowstone come to the edge of the thermal basins just as they do here."

"What?"
She stopped and glared at me. "But I know they don't! I've seen pictures."

I realized almost at once how she could have gotten honestly mixed up from pictures. There are several geyser basins in Yellowstone so many acres in extent that one may take any number of pictures without having trees and shrubs in the background; nevertheless similar conditions produce similar results and where the burned-out thermal area stops the trees and shrubs begin at once.

The basin she was showing us was not on that vast scale; it could have been lost in one corner of the Norris Geyser Basin, for example. Consequently trees and shrubs were never far away. In the enormously bigger basins of Yellowstone the nearest greenery might be several hundred yards away, but the basic arrangement was precisely the same-in the smaller thermal areas of Yellowstone the spatial relationships were just like those around us.

There was no reason for us to quarrel. I did not design Yellowstone and she did not design the Whakarewarewa thermal area. So I tried to straighten the matter out. She was still boiling, shouting that every other American who had ever been there had told her that she was right and anyhow the pictures proved I was wrong. I said, "I think it is just a mix-up, a misunderstanding. You see-"

"You can't argue with photographs! I'll
show
them to you!"

The Englishmen were beginning to look at us oddly and I was growing embarrassed. "Let me explain how it is at Yellowstone. You see-"

"I've no time to listen to explanations now. Come on, we're late!" She turned and stomped up the path.

I shut up, realizing that she did not want explanations. The superiority of "her" thermal area was a matter of dogma; it was emotionally, though illogically, related to the superiority of the Maori race. Several times during the next hour she turned to me and said, in several different ways, that it was very funny that I was the only American who had not agreed and so forth; she did not quite call me a liar but she made it clear that I must know that I was not telling the truth. But every effort to explain she brushed off; she had no time to listen to heresy.