Our first pit stop on the way here was at the Waitomo glow worm caves. This was pretty nifty. You descend into these limestone caves until you reach these cathedral rooms with glowing blue dots all over the ceiling. There were these four women on our bus that were just unbelievably rude. They were shoving my family aside in these caves because, ya know, you get a big white trash prize for beating everyone to the glow worms. Once back on the bus our group of 10 made it our personal mission to talk trash about these women and make their trip as uncomfortable as possible. Here's where things start to go down hill as we pretty much laughed from 12pm through 10pm. After the caves we stopped at "The Big Apple" for lunch. Think less New York City and more country bumpkin kitchen in the middle of a very scenic no where. They also had a massive fiber glass apple with the words THE BIG APPLE written across it. This "thing" had an opening which would allow you to climb up to it's "observation deck". Bwahahahaha, laughable. Lunch at this establishment was even more humorous. It was buffet style and almost as if they couldn't quite decide on a cuisine as there was just a menagerie of different styles of cooking...nothing cooked well.
We finally made it to our hotel, got settled in and after a few cocktails ran down to the lobby to be picked up for our authentic Maori (indigenous people) dinner extraveganza. Don't start giggling yet, it gets better/worse. The bus is already filled to the brim with the geriatric crew; red flag number one. The entire family starts looking at each other as if to say, oh fuck what did we get ourselves into. The bus departs, literally turns a corner and pulls into the building adjacent to our hotel. We all immediately burst into boisterous laughter as we're thinking, hell we could have walked. It turns out that this is simply where we stop for our "orientation and the first two part of our adventure". We're ushered into this little room with some lame setup where we're shown a 60 second video about the migration of the Maori's from Tahiti to NZ. I shit you not, it's about 60 seconds. After that video we're told to follow the path through the atrium to another room. As we enter the room we quickly realized we're in another video viewing type room. This video too was about 60 seconds. By now the family is suppressing thunderous laughter. We're trying to be respectful as we were told by our Maori guide that this all is a very serious deal but it's not working well. We get back on the bus and begin driving up the hills to the Maori village. During the drive we're instructed that we must pick a "chief" from our bus load of people. This chief will have to engage the real Maori chief in an authentic ritual to allow us into their village. The guide picked this man on our bus from the U.S. named Marion and his wifes name was Ginger. Ok, that's it...we're now the obnoxious American tourist group who is laughing so hard we can't stop. Where's Gilligan and the skipper too?? The other bus passengers HATED us. So we get there and begin this ritual but the hard part was that we couldn't smile or laugh during the ceremony because it would be considered an insult. These guys were jumping around sticking their tongues out at us in loin clothes and I can't laugh. Shit. I'll spare you all the other parts of this evening but I will say that it turned out to be extremely interesting. They danced and sang us native songs which were incredibly beautiful and well rehearsed. The ride home was another story. The family is still laughing at every little off colored thing and then our driver decides that each group from each country must single a song to the rest of the bus from that country. We picked B-I-N-G-O and bingo was his name-o, but that didn't go over well. NOT ONE PERSON CLAPPED FOR US but everyone else clapped after the other songs. Suddenly the driver starts singing, "she'll be comin' round the mountain when she comes" and pulls 15 looks around a roundabout at high speed in the bus. We were virtually flying all over the place and uncontrollably laughing more. When they finally dropped us off this woman looks at me and says in a snide voice, "hate to see ya go". I looked at her and said, "liar".
ANYWAY, you really had to be there but I have some of this on tape. Painful stuff. We're packing up right now and about to head to the airport to fly down to Queenstown on the south island for three days of action packed adventure. Jake is going to bungee jump at the birthplace of bungee jumping. We're taking a jet boat at high speed through the canyons of the southern alps and apparently a lot more. Pray for us ;)
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