Some confusion

My first shot of my geothermal trip last week, uploaded for Sara (Not Sarah, the 'h' is important here.)

There is (For some unexplained reason) some confusion between the living village (Where people wash their clothing and cook dinner in hot pools.) and the fortified village (Where a bunch of guys buit a pa [Bunch of houses with a big fence around it.] in the middle of a geyser filed in the very real belief that anyone attacking would get boiled alive. (Also, they liked to scare people by waiting for eruptions then dancing about, pretending to magic the earth.)

For those who are interested, this is why new zealand place names are so long. Maori is an oral language, before eurpeans invented the pencil (And then used it to stab natives.) they passed knowledge along by word of mouth (Which saved on spelling.) Thus, all the history had to be kept alive in place names and such, things like 'that is the rock where so-and-so slept with someone's wife, and that is why we're at war right now.' [True place name!]

Maori is also inverted, names are written back to front, the smaller a place, the larger the name. (So you'd have a place called nowhere, and three towns in it called the end, start and middle of nowhere. Your particular village might end up being called 'The small settlement between the start, but west of the middle of nowhere.' ) This makes for a lot of long, similar names. On the signs you can see a rough translation (Especially the one on the right) of what these two names mean, but to tell a true translation, you'd need to hear a 10 minute story involving war, bloodshed, two rapes, several hunting parties and of course, volcanoes.

And I'm not going to tell you it, go away.