Now for some culture!!! This stop is one of the big advertising points on the Stray Bus brochure. Its referred to as their cultural stop and general good time and we were not disappointed on either account. The general point of the place was to give us a night in the traditional Maori style which included 3 basic things: Cultural dinner, the Hakka, and Maori sleeping. First off was the dinner which was similar to a lot of island people from around the world. It consisted of lamb, fish, and veggies that were cooked in an underground hole in some sort of earth crock-pot. It wasn't too bad all things considered.
The second and defiantly most entertaining part of the evening was the Haka, which is a war dance that the Maori do in preparation for battle, or in our case to impress women per the instructor ;)...in hindsight i dont believe it worked out quite like that...i think there was much more laughing than impressing!!! So for the first part of show we had to go outside and establish our tribe and “prove ourselves friendly” to the house tribe. Now what tribe would be complete without a chief...and if you were in a group of 30 people from around the world who do you suppose would be unanimously elected chief....yeah, that's right.................JOE. I know, that's like the United Nations appointing Carrot-top as their leader. I would like to say that we did the best with what we had, but...yeah... Anyway, the tribe accepted us and put on a authentic Haka dance for us to enjoy. It really was quite good and had a lot of impact. The basic gist included big shirtless men doing quite a bit of foot stomping, chest slapping, and spear spinning. Sounds exciting eh?!
We found out later that the main duty of the “chief” was to shout the commands that signaled us “common people” to move from one part of our dance to the next. The short coming to this being that our “chief” couldn't remember a single word of the 3 phrases he was supposed to remember...queue the laughing. It was decided at that point that we would have 3 “chiefs” including myself and one of our Canadian buddies (yee-haw for the western hemisphere!!!). It turns out that Joe was not a dumb as we had originally thought and no-one could remember the correct words, at which point a silent agreement was made to just make up the words as we saw fit. This proved much more effective and funny. So anyway, the rest of our version of the Haka continued on much like the first...horrible. It was like trying to watch a groups of senior citizens do the mackarana...except we we're shirtless. I think the real tribe might actually still be laughing about it :D.
The last part of the experience was the Maori sleeping room. Apparently Maori people don't do the whole “bedroom” thing, instead they opt to share one gigantic room where everyone pulls out a mattress and sleeps on the floor. This was interesting to say the least and was pinnacled by the fact that we were woke up at 7 am to nothing other than ABBA!!!! Joe seemed less than enthusiastic to being awoken to “Dancing Queen.” To which i replied “its not everyday you get to wake up to ABBA.” Then the little Maori lady in the corner said “Yes it is.” Apparently this woman has to listen to the same CD every single morning!!!!!!!! and you thought your life was bad!!!!!!!! Poor lady.
