WORDS — LUCY KENNEDY
Watching industrial complexes and traffic lights slide past the car window, eventually fading into stretching farmland dotted with cattle is a deeply familiar view – all set to the soundtrack of road trip playlists and chatter.
I’m an Aucklander, and I’ve never lived in Rotorua. However, my mum was born there, and my pop has lived there his entire life, so I’ve visited him and my other family there more times than I can count. Rotorua is extremely familiar to me, a ground of memories and the site of endless family stories featuring the many characters within our slightly complex and extensive family tree. When I was younger, going to Rotorua held the magic of a holiday, being transported somewhere outside the ordinary. Now, it feels like a homecoming of sorts – one where I know I’ll be welcomed by my family, the smell of sulphur, and the extremely familiar sight of Lake Rotorua.
In memory, Rotorua seems so autumnal, despite many scorching, golden days that necessitated trips to the Blue Lakes. Kuirau Park is the place I associate most with this. I remember my cousins and I clad in scarves knit by my nana, wandering between the steaming mud pools – viciously hot and yet mesmerising – on chilly mornings. We’d feed the ducks with Pop, scattering stale bread to the waiting birds.
Rotorua is a place that’s extremely entwined with family in my mind. We usually call to the cemetery to visit both our family interred there, and an angel statue, way at the back where the graves are crumbling and Victorian. Somebody’s loved ones commissioned a life-sized marble angel to watch over their grave, and, as a little girl living across the road, my mum would play amongst the graves and gaze at the gracious, gorgeous angel.
Rotorua is a place that’s extremely entwined with family in my mind.
Whakarewarewa Forest, home of the Redwoods, is a place where you can feel just how ancient New Zealand’s forests truly are. With each stride deeper along any of the many walks or tramps, the air becomes more cool and more damp. Vibrant koru unfurl from the bracken underfoot, birds herald their songs. You can traverse a pathway over a sulphur pool and see layers of sticks and leaves encrusted with white crystalline substances, still as if suspended as if in glass, the acidity of the sulphur rendering them alien-like.
Once my mum took my brother and I to the night walk at the Redwoods, where you can stumble along rope bridges between trees decorated like lanterns and hung with lights. I’ve been told that my uncle trained to be a firefighter by running at the Redwoods. It’s a tiny piece of family history that makes me feel linked to the past, a Rotorua of the 1970s known to me only in the dulled warmth of red, damaged old photos.
I’ve sat in anticipation on the gondolas of Mount Ngongotahā many times, waiting to reach the top where the real fun awaits: the Luge. It always felt like a death-defying leap to step into a slowly rotating gondola cart, and as you ascended, you could see sheep, hedgehogs, and abandoned helmets in bright hues scattered along the hillside. Once we’d raced down the mountain with only a slight amount of competitive rivalry (although I did once notoriously run my uncle off the road), we’d visit my great grandmother. I have many memories of sitting in her lounge, surreptitiously eating as many biscuits as I could while sneakily pilfering glances at the sensational stories I was definitely not supposed to be reading in her copies of Women’s Day. Inevitably, the alluring box of toys would come out from the spare room that many relatives had played with over the years.
As a result of hounding my mum over the years to take me there, I’ve spent a good bit of time at the best bookshop in Rotorua, McLeod’s. Independent bookshops always feel like safe havens, and McLeod’s is no different with their handwritten signs and lovely staff. If we were extremely lucky, we’d also get a trip to Lady Jane’s for an ice cream (marshmallow and coconut ice flavour, of course).
McLeod’s used to be on Hinemoa Street, just down from Tutanekai Street – names taken from the Māori myth of two lovers separated by Lake Rotorua’s waters. The street names always remind me of listening to a recording of the myth in the car with my parents and little brother, and watching the landscape rolling by.
I love Rotorua. I love watching Tipping Point and The Chase at my pop’s house, guessing at trivia before the hapless contestants can. I love walking in the Government Gardens, passing the Blue Baths (now sadly shut) where my mum learnt to swim and would later take her children. I love the journey there, which always makes me appreciate the rugged, wild beauty of our country, and our pastoral, gumboot-wearing national identity. Driving to visit my family, passing thermal steam billowing from road grates, I always feel connected to both my younger self and my mum.
And if you need me, I’ll be at McLeod’s.
