On to Rotorua, November 25 & 26

 November 25

  We left Matamata which we so enjoyed and drove the hour to Rotorua, a city of about 80,000 on the shores of the sulphur-smelling Lake Rotorua.

    We were able to check in early to the Prince's Gate Hotel, a grand old hotel. We are on the ground floor. Our room has a chandelier!

Prince's Gate Hotel

The lobby decorated for the holidays

    We went to the tourist bureau and had Vietnamese food.

    Then, we walked a bit in the Government Gardens and down to the lake which was less scenic than we had imagined and...way smellier!

     Barbara took another short walk to locate the hotel where we can go into the hot pools should we want to and passed a very hot spring en route.

     We had a light dinner of appetizers at the hotel.

November 26

        Our hotel includes breakfast, so we had a hearty one before taking off early to Lake Okareka, a few miles out of town where we had a full morning of bird watching and saw some fantastic birds on our walk. 

Breakfast (Mark in background)

      En route we got some very good news from home and almost at the same time, we spotted a New Zealand fantail which displayed its tail for us repeatedly. (But hard to catch on camera).

We also spotted a yellow hammer, another gorgeous bird that we have heard, but not seen, until today. These birds will remind us of the good news that we heard for the rest of our lives, we think.

Hard to see, but a fantail who displayed for us, but hard to capture with a photo

      We also saw: common white-faced heron, pied stilts, Australian swamp hen, (known here as pukeko), Paradise shelduck, song thrush, two kinds of cormorants (the little black cormorant and the Australian pied cormorant which also known as shags),

Pied Stilt

blue teal - a blue duck not the same as ours, grey teal, rosella, swamp harrier, silver eye (fleeting glimpse), common chafinch Grey gerygone, New Zealand bellbird (another fleeting glimpse), red-billed gull, tui and some other common birds like the blackbirds and song sparrows.

Yellow hammer

We heard a sacred kingfisher and a European green finch, but just could not see them.

       Timing was great as it started to pour when we got back to Rotorua and we had lunch in the lounge at the hotel in comfy leather chairs and checked our emails, working on photos and the blog. (WiFi is not great in our room.)

Ferns and Redwoods

       After lunch we went to the Redwoods Forest here. The redwoods were brought from California at the beginning of the 20th century because New Zealand had cut down so many of its native species.

 They grow faster than they do in California due to the moisture and fertile soil.

 

     The native tribe now owns the Redwoods here. There is a 700 meter tree walk, but we opted to walk a circuit of about two miles. We heard two new birds, but never saw them, although we tried - the Tomtit (endemic to N.Z.) and the Shining Bronze Cuckoo. (The tiny cuckoo is the most southernly parasitic bird who parasitizes the nest of the gerygones.

    We ate a sandwich in our room and then went across the street to the civic center where, for a week, the children of the area perform a yearly celebration of the Maori culture. We thought it would be nice to support the local schools and am sure we were the only tourists there! It was family and kids.

    It is so interesting to see everyone singing, dancing and speaking Maori when most of the population is non-Maori. One of the schools had all their children with drawn-on chin tattoos. We sat next to a teacher in one of the schools and she explained that in this area, everyone is taught both languages.

Warming up outside before going "on"

    It was quite joyful.