Whakarewarewa

On Friday the 19th, I was not at school. I was about 457 kilometers away, in Rotorua, by the time everyone else was sitting around eating lunch. To be exact, I was in Whakarewarewa village. (It is pronouced faka-rae-wa-rae-wa. You can visit their website here.) This village is surrounded by geysers and steam vents, as well as boiling hotpools. The photos show a meeting house through the steam, and a place where the ground is falling away because of the steam. The surface temperature on some of the hotpools is about 200 degrees celcius! THAT IS HOT!!!! The deeper down in the pool you get, the hotter it is. People live in the village too, and they use some of the pools for cooking stuff like sweetcorn in little netted bags held up by a string tied to a rock. They also have put little boxes with lids over some of the steam vents so they can cook their dinner. You can walk all the way around the village and see all the hot pools. You can actually move into the village if you are from the same bloodline as the people living there, but I recommend you don't, not because the people there aren't nice, but because it smells like rotten eggs! Despite the smell, I think it would be really cool to live there! The people are really nice and all from the same bloodline, but there are 26 different families living there. I'll tell you more about the rest of my holiday in later posts (like maybe tomorrow!)