When we checked out the next morning we found that they had charged us for one extra day and two extra meals. I called it to their attention with a minimum of comment, waited while they corrected it, and returned my key-ten shillings deposit. But they had the last laugh anyhow, for they gave us less than the established exchange rate for our dollars and I was too much in a hurry to go out to a bank for the correct rate. As we climbed into a taxi I shook the dust of the place from my shoes and did not look back.
The trip around North Island was very pleasant, in spite of hotels almost as bad as the Waverly and food that was just as bad in most cases. We used the hotels just to sleep in and were on the move, out in the open country, all day long. New Zealand is truly a beautiful place; once away from the eyesores they use for towns and cities one could easily fall in love with it.
The first jump was to Waitomo, by bus. The bus had been described as a "luxury bus" to distinguish it from their ordinary cross-country buses, which are known as service cars. It was not bad, but the seats are so narrow and close together that they are really suited only to married couples still in love-so Ticky and I happily held hands the entire trip. Brazil could tell them something about luxury buses, however.
The first stop was at the Waitomo Hotel, by itself in beautiful country. There we had the only decent hotel accommodations in all our stay in New Zealand. It was just a simple room and bath, but good, clean, new, and comfortable-say an $8 room in a decent commercial hotel in America. But it looked like heaven to us.
The Waitomo was the only good hotel we found in New Zealand, and even it had oddities which would not be tolerated in America-the habit, for example, of paging a guest by loudspeaker: "Mr. Tompkins, room twenty-five, report to the desk!" We had run into this army-barracks procedure first in the steamship Monowai; if the purser wanted to see a passenger, he ordered him, by loudspeaker, to report to his office, instead of sending a messenger with the message couched as a request. This rude practice is common throughout New Zealand. The peremptory knock in the early morning, even on Sundays, the lack of room service, and the boarding-meal hours and style of serving are common to all hotels that we saw; New Zealanders apparently do not mind being strictly disciplined on their holidays. But, allowing for these customs of the country, the Waitomo was a good hotel. Even its cooking was markedly better than that of the Waverly-not good, but edible and usually clean. By contrast it seemed wonderful.
After dinner, during an unusually long wait for coffee in the lounge, we met the manager, Mr. W. F. Swift. I had remarked that the two pages serving coffee were doing it in such a back-handed, steps-retracing fashion that they seemed unlikely ever to finish, whereupon the gentleman next to me introduced himself as the manager. It became evident that he knew his job and wanted to run the best hotel possible-and his efforts showed.
He asked us what room we were in; Ticky answered, "Number three." He nodded and said, "Ah yes, the Royal Suite."
Ticky said, "Why do you call it that?"
"Eh? Because it is. The room you have was the Duke's room; the one connecting with it, number four, was the one occupied by the Queen-let me see, uh, just four weeks ago today."
I looked at Ticky and she looked at me. We managed not to laugh until we were safe in the "Duke's room"-then we got slightly hysterical. Not that there was anything wrong with the room; it was in all respects comfortable, proper, and decently furnished. I am sure the Duke of Edinburgh was comfortable in it, even though you could have lost it and never missed the space in the incredible "room" we had enjoyed in the Raffles. But the notion that we had had to acquire the Royal Suite to enjoy accommodations adequate but less luxurious than those of any of thousands of motels in America hit us, in our weakened state, as riotously funny.
The bathtub in the Royal Suite was exceptionally long and I suspect it was specially installed in consideration for the Duke's height-certainly all the fixtures were new. I know I found it a luxury even though I am two inches shorter than the Duke. But it had one oddity which I learned presently was characteristic of New Zealand plumbing: they do not revent drain lines and consequently, when a drain is thirty-five feet or more above its discharge, the drain hole will show a full fifteen pounds per square inch of vacuum, enough to be startling and moderately dangerous. I found this out by stepping on the drain hole in the tub, to my great surprise and moderate pain. I wrote a story once about a man who sealed off a vacuum leak by sitting on it; I really should rewrite that story since I did not know at the time just how absorbing a trick it is.
I managed to pull my foot loose with nothing but a large strawberry mark to show for the mishap. I hope the Duke did not step on the drain.
Waitomo is a limestone-cave resort. There are three caves, all quite good, but I am not going to describe stalactites, stalagmites, and such. If you have seen limestone caves anywhere in the world you have seen much the same thing; if you have seen the Mammoth Cave or Carlsbad Caverns you have seen much more. I am not running down the Waitomo Caves; I love limestone caves anywhere, never miss a chance to go through them, and these are excellent examples. But if you have seen one, description is unnecessary; if you have not, description is almost worthless-it is time you treated yourself to the experience.
But there is one aspect of one cave there which is unique, to be seen nowhere else in the world: the Glow-Worm Grotto. It is a surpassing emotional experience which may well be worth making a trip of thousands of miles to see and worth even the indignities of New Zealand hotels. The glow worm referred to in the name is the larva of a small fly, Arachnocampa luminosa, whereas our glow worm is the larva of a beetle-but the difference is important only to another glow worm or an entomologist; it is a worm that glows by the same biochemical process which makes our fireflies light up. The larvae, an inch to two inches long, live on the ceilings of Cave Waitomo, where they spin threads like spider webs to catch other insects.
We went through Cave Waitomo the evening of our arrival. The first part of the tour is the usual limestone-cave trip, beautiful and impressive but not unique. Then the guide explains that he is about to turn off the lights, as the glow worms shut off their light if disturbed by light or sound. We are enjoined to keep absolute quiet. In the darkness we are led down to a big boat in an underground river; each visitor is handed into the boat in darkness, seated, and given whispered orders to sit still, keep quiet, and show no light.
With no sound but breathings and the water lapping gently against the side of the boat we are pulled along in pitch darkness, the guide moving the boat by means of steel rope let into the rock walls. The boat makes a turn to the left, following the course of the underground stream.
There is a chorused gasp, muffled at once. The ceiling of the cavern we have just entered is covered with many, many thousands of tiny blue lights, so many and so bright that we can now see the awed faces of our companions in the boat, enough light to read newspaper headlines. The sight is most like that of the Galaxy spilling across a clear desert sky on a moonless night, the gasp from the boat like that one always hears when the "stars" first come out in a planetarium show. It does not feel like a cave; it feels like open sky and glimmering stars.
The above is correct, as far as it goes. I am afraid I cannot convey the eerie emotional experience of the silent walk through darkness down to an underground river, the spooky, River-Styx feeling of that black and muffled voyage. It is good that the glow worms are shy, for a single gaggling word would blemish the awesome spell of that unearthly place.
We went from Waitomo to Wairakei by train and bus, stopping overnight at the Chateau, their best-known resort hotel in the middle of National Park. Their trains are good, but smaller than ours; their goods wagons look toylike compared with our freight cars. The Chateau would be comparable to the hotels in our own national parks if it were well run. It is not. Poor food, a sickening stench in the dining room, and more of the army-barracks spirit in handling the guests. We were bawled out for daring to sit down at an empty tabl
e in the dining room-cold, dirt, and tongue-lashings are routine for the visitor to New Zealand; you must harden yourself to it while there.
The bus ride from the Chateau to Wairakei was one of the most interesting parts of the tour, even though it was scheduled simply as a means of getting us from one tourist attraction to another, for the reason that it took us intimately into New Zealand farming country and let us see a little of how the New Zealand countryman lives. The bus traveled much more than twice the road distance, wandering around through small villages and up side streets, delivering newspapers, picking up mail, stopping at a hail to pick up a note from a farmer's wife and deliver it to some farm farther up the way. We could see clearly for the first time that the whites and the Maori actually did live intimately together in the country, with no apparent color line. The countryside is fertile and has a feminine beauty, the paddocks and fields being separated by hedge rows rather than fences, English style. The back roads are poor, the houses small and rather grim, the cross-roads stores very poorly stocked; the much-vaunted high standard of living is not evident. In several places there were kennel-like housing developments, with whole families living in cramped boxes that made the worst of company towns in America look like well-planned suburbs. Housing is New Zealand's most acute shortage, but it is hard to see what obstacles prevent solving it, other than those they have deliberately placed on themselves through legislation. But even the best houses are uniformly dreary, made more so by an all-prevalent use of drab yellow paint, and even new houses are built in the same nineteenth-century style which accounts in part for the 1890 overall impression the country gives one.
New Zealand seems to be a place where no one goes hungry, but where life is dreary and comfortless beyond belief, save for the pleasures of good climate and magnificent countryside.
The bus delivered us at last to Hotel Wairakei, having taken four hours to cover seventy miles. Wairakei is a thermal-activity neighborhood rather than a town; it has geysers, hot springs, boiling mud springs, and colored formations in abundance, and is also the center of the government's experiments in harnessing volcanic steam for heat and power, a project pictured last year in Life magazine. The geothermal bores are located near the hotel and the hotel is alleged to be heated by them; perhaps in time heat for hotels will become a common thing there. As yet, the experiments have not realized commercial results but there is every reason to expect that they will. The amount of dry steam underground here is illustrated by one thermal activity which is not duplicated or excelled in Yellowstone (grand as they are, all other thermal activities in New Zealand are no match for Yellowstone, a demonstrable fact no New Zealander will believe). This exception is the Karapiti Blow Hole, which incessantly blows dry steam at 180 lbs./sq. in. pressure and has been doing so without let-up at least since the Maori arrived there in the fourteenth century. The guide there referred to it as "New Zealand's Relief Valve" and suggested that the island might blow up if the blow hole were stopped up-Ticky was all for sneaking back at night and dumping rocks and cement into it, but she is a vandal at heart as well as an anarchist.
Speaking of vandals, our several visits to the geysers and so forth of Wairakei area were made less than pleasant by the New Zealander's own disregard for his country's natural wonders. Even the guides joined in the casual sport of tearing up the vegetation, roiling the lily pools, chucking refuse into hot springs and the like. After the firm discipline of our own National Park Rangers plus the unending and quite successful warnings to us all not to disfigure our parks it was shocking to see these people witlessly damaging their national treasures. Yet we never once heard a government guide protest or warn.
In fact, in the Waitomo Caves we saw one of the guides break off a stalactite (which took endless years to grow) just to show a party of twenty people its inner structure. In these caves the formations were covered with disfiguring chicken wire where they could be reached, just to stop such rape-but the formations in our Carlsbad Caverns have no such protection and need none, for each party that goes down is so indoctrinated before starting that, should a tourist be so reckless as to harm a formation, the Rangers would almost certainly have to intervene to save him from violence at the hands of the outraged majority. We have our vandals, certainly-but we regard them as vermin. Not so there.
This same guide at Waitomo mentioned something else that surprised us almost as much as the destruction of the stalactite. It turned out that Ticky had the only flashlight in the party, whereupon the guide mentioned that the week before the lights had failed and a guide had been forced to lead a party out in the pitch blackness, relying on his memory of the twists and turns underground. Despite this incident, our guide had no torch of any sort. One of the New Zealand tourists remarked that the government certainly should buy him a flashlight, whereupon all the rest of the party and the guide himself agreed solemnly that the government certainly should, as the present situation was dangerous. Ticky and I kept quiet. No one at all suggested that a professional cave guide, not supplied with a free flashlight, might consider investing ten shillings in a flashlight of his own rather than wait for a bureaucrat to think of it.
The Wairakei Hotel had the usual swank lounge and dining room, poor food and lack of service; it was exceptional only in having the smallest room we encountered around the world. It contained a double bed and there was barely room for one person to walk down one side and the end, with the bed jammed against two walls.
We went on from there to Rotorua, fifty miles away. Rotorua is a town built right on top of a thermal area; there are geysers, hot springs, and plumes of steam popping out at odd places in back yards, in parks, or by the roadside. The Wairakei area and Rotorua and its environs comprise most of the thermal area in New Zealand. One gets the impression that thermal activity in New Zealand covers a vast area, much larger than Yellowstone, but this is not true; a map of Yellowstone, to the same scale, placed over a map of New Zealand, will show that the area of thermal activity in Yellowstone is more widespread than the corresponding area in New Zealand. After trying this comparison I wondered why the New Zealand area seemed larger and concluded that it arose from one difference: the New Zealand thermal area is not a reserve, except for certain very small areas of intense activity; farms and houses and villages fill up the space between these very limited enclaves; on the other hand, in Yellowstone we have chosen to block off the entire space, all 3500 square miles of it, more than 2,000,000 acres.
This comparison is not a criticism of the New Zealand policy, as New Zealand simply could not possibly afford to block off an area the size of Yellowstone in the middle of North Island. Besides, while I would not change Yellowstone by one pine needle, nevertheless there is a quaint charm about a country town in which the houses and fruit trees and privies intermingle with geysers and hot springs.
The Hotel Geyser in Rotorua did nothing to sully New Zealand's unchallenged record for the worst in hotels. Our room was larger than the one at Wairakei, but, since it had twin beds, it was not roomier. Since we were going to be there longer than overnight I started to ask for a chair, there being none of any nature in the room, then refrained from doing so after I had considered every possibility and discovered that no jigsaw puzzle maneuvering could possibly make room for a chair in that lovely boudoir.
The mattress on my bed was such that I took it off the bed each night and placed it under the bed. In my opinion this improved things somewhat, as there was a hard boxlike structure under the mattress which seemed to me to make better sleeping than the alleged mattress. Ticky chose to sleep among the hills and valleys of her mattress; I don't know which one of us came out ahead, but we both resorted to sleeping pills every night that we were there. There was no danger of us sleeping through breakfast as a Maori maid came in at seven each morning to wake us with tannic acid solution and another Maori girl toured the corridors, banging on a Maori war gong-allee-samee lid of garbage can, with decorations-at seven-thirty to make sure no one failed to sit down on t
ime. This clamor went on even on Sunday mornings.
We were unable to keep the maid out of the room at seven a.m. because we could not get a key to our room, nor could it be bolted from inside. Immediately after checking in I went back to the desk and made a fight talk for a key, somewhat exaggerating the value of my camera equipment and of Ticky's jewelry to justify the unusual (in New Zealand) request . . . in fact, between camera, binoculars, typewriter, engagement ring, and a few gewgaws, we did have items with us which it would have grieved us to lose.
The manageress told me somewhat frostily that we did not need a key since everyone around there was honest. Right at this point a bellman came up to her, stuck out his hand, and asked for the key to the linen locker; she reached under the desk and got it for him while still talking to me. I looked at him, looked back at her, and said, "I thought you just told me that keys were quite unnecessary around here because everyone was honest?"
This made her angry and she informed me quite huffily that the linen locker was another matter entirely. I did not get the key.
While we were there Ticky took her baths wearing all her jewelry, such as it was. Insurance compensation does not interest her.
Perhaps everyone around there was indeed honest; we did not miss anything. But New Zealand is the only country we visited where we were cheated in making change and it happened there so frequently as to justify fairing a curve and declaring a trend.
The hotel was standard in all other respects. The room had no coat hangers, of course; the food was bad and dirty; the coffee was one point worse than any other, for it was not drinkable at all-and I will happily drink very bad coffee rather than do without; I am a coffee addict. But the meals were rendered somewhat cheerful by Maori waitresses in old Maori costumes, very fancy indeed. The Maori are a handsome people and Maori girls are very pretty indeed, if you like them a little on the plump side. The girls were not only smiling and attractive but actually seemed to want to please the guests. They dressed in a skirt much like a hula skirt made of New Zealand flax, scraped, rolled and dried in such a fashion that the strands look like strings of beads. When they walk the strands make a cheerful clacking sound. Above the waist they wear fancy embroidered bodices, strapless, with arms and shoulders bare.
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