Near miss with royalty in a Maori paradise
All things Maori Maori fashion designer Adrienne Whitewood had good reason for being a bit harried when I rang her up while visiting Rotorua on New Zealand’s North Island. “You know Meghan Markle? She’s coming here on Wednesday,” she said, her voice shaking with anticipation.
The Duchess of Sussex and her husband, Prince Harry, were touring Australia and New Zealand the same three weeks that I was. And Adrienne was designing a dress for a friend who would be sitting beside the duchess as the Maori interpreter at her Rotorua powhiri, or welcome ceremony.
“For me, the irony of it is that the monarchy, if you look back through history, has colonized New Zealand,” Adrienne said over coffee near her boutique, Ahu, “and now they’re promoting Maori culture and Indigenous people.”
Some iwi, or tribes, are still in the process of confronting the crown over historical grievances concerning violations of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, as part of a decades-long reconciliation effort. Meghan and Harry coming to town to press noses and foreheads in the traditional Maori familial greeting, or to give a speech in Maori, as Harry did, was, as Adrienne put it, “a really big deal for us.”
You don’t have to be a royal to experience a dramatic entrance to Rotorua, though. Simply driving there from Auckland, past sheep and cows walking across grassy hills as if defying gravity felt like being in The Lord of the Rings. Essentially, you are. An hour before you get to Rotorua, you can pull off and take a tour of the Shire on the Hobbiton Movie Set on a former farm — touristy but beyond worth it if you’re a fan.
You will also smell Rotorua before you get there; that’s how strong the geothermal sulphur is.
But this city thrives and is a centre of New Zealand’s Maori culture, precisely because of its abundant geothermal activity. Magma is so unusually close to the surface here that pools of mud bubble like caldrons and street drains emit steam. (Hell’s Gate, Rotorua’s most active geothermal park and spa, is where the Orcs emerged for battle from primordial ooze.) The valley’s warmth, and the large lake from which the city gets its name, were what drew its first Maori settlers from the Te Arawa tribe in the 14th century. In the living Maori village of Te Whakarewarewa, next to the Maori arts and crafts school of Te Puia, people still heat their homes with steam and cook in geothermal pools.
Rotorua’s abundant outdoor activities hearken to Maori deep appreciation of nature. A walk along the suspended bridges of Redwoods Treewalk (another Harry and Meghan stop) and zip-lining with Rotorua Canopy Tours involved talks of conservancy and how the companies have worked with the traditional Maori landowners to do as little damage to the land as possible.
I felt most in tune with the earth during a Maori food tour with a chef named Charles Royal and his wife, Tania. They run a business supplying Indigenous ingredients to restaurants and events around the world. In the bush behind their house, Charles said a prayer in Maori, then we picked fiddlehead fern, or pikopiko, and a peppery leaf know as horopito. Afterward, they served a small feast in the woods.
The long way to paradise
Getting to Fiji from New Zealand should have been an easy trip. The island paradise is less than a three-hour flight away.
But by the time I left Rotorua, after grabbing coffee with Adrienne and trying to track down another site where Harry and Meghan were headed, I was an hour behind. I would have made it if I’d had perfect traffic conditions. But there was a downpour, and construction, and many double-tractor-trailers on a two-lane highway. Any leeway I had slipped away.
Once in Auckland, I sat in the Alamo rental car office for two hours, rebooking my flight and finding a place to stay overnight near the airport. I had to forfeit my cheap Fiji Airways ticket because the only flight the next day was sold out. A woman working at the rental car counter drove me to my hotel.
Then I nearly missed my new flight waiting at my hotel to print out an emergency write-in ballot I was trying to send back to the states for the midterm elections. I found out 10 minutes before check-in closed that Air New Zealand wouldn’t let me on the plane unless I also had a ticket out of Fiji. I booked it on my phone while waiting in line with one minute to go. The sequence of events had me so frazzled that I lost (and found) my passport at security. And then when I got onboard, the pilot announced that he had to come up with a new flight plan because an ash cloud had erupted over Fiji.
Over the course of this 52 Places journey, though, I’ve learned to embrace mishaps in travel as part of the experience. In Seville, I purposefully slept through a bus ride I’d booked because I needed to recover from a cold. Heading to Bolzano, Italy, I overslept on an overnight bus and wound up in Austria. This was my first missed flight in 10 months. With each new mishap, though, I feel more confident that I could handle myself in a real crisis.
As I craned my head from my middle seat in the middle of the plane to look at the blue waters below, I could feel my stress levels drop. After we landed, a group of guitarists played Fijian tunes for us in the passport line. My rental car took me to a roadside oasis in the city of Nadi: Sweet Laisa’s Kitchen, where I had a kind of ceviche in coconut juice, known as kokoda,. After all the effort it had taken to get there, it tasted extra delicious.
The journey to my hotel, the Fiji Marriott Resort Momi Bay, took me down twisting roads. Cresting one hill, I gasped as I caught a glimpse of the ocean, gleaming, for the first time since I’d been in the air.
Then, while pulling into the driveway, a horse ran across my path so fast I almost thought it was an illusion. At check-in, I could see a row of thatched-roof bungalows standing on stilts in the middle of a lagoon. Another set of singers greeted me in song. “Bula!” they shouted. “Welcome home!”