OVERLAND LAKES. [BT A TRAMP.]

Waikato Times, Volume XVI, Issue 1366, 2 April 1881, Page 3

OVERLAND LAKES. [BT A TRAMP.]

Looking down from the hills on the marvellous beauties of Lake Rotorua, the firai thing that will strike an approaching visitor, 'after the general impression created by the the soft, placid, tender loveliness, is the general appearance of dreamy unreality in the wonderful changing tints of the lake and the surrounding hills, from black or iron grey to bright green and. rose, or crimson, purple or even bright scarlet, will be the jets of steam issuing from various points of the ground *»I 1 round the borders of the lake. In all directions these may be seen, and, howevet wonderful and striking, are a disfigurement of the general beauty. -These jets are all known to the older residents on the lake as proceeding from different hot springs, all named, and re- ' markable for some particular medicinal qualities or some wonderful exhibition ot the*orces of Nature, like Ohinemutu, with its baths and infant township, Whakarewarewa, with its boiling springs and geysers, Sulphur Point, with its numerous boiling cracks and holes and small mud volcanoes and cones of sulphur, Tiketere, the site of some large boiling springs, and other little places of inferior interest, that can boast like some of their visitors, of being cracked and nothing more. The artistic designer of Lake Rotorua has very skilfully placed a little gem of a cone-shaped island, known as Mokoia in the centre of its bosom, that blushes and pales, and frowns and smiles with its lovely mistress, and even owns a little hot spring that has its own pretty little native legend and all complete. Though it may be a small lake in comparison with royal Taupo and some of the Southern lakes, Itotorua covers a very respectable extent of ground, viz., twelve miles by nine, and as a sanatorium stand unrivalled in all the world, and, as a show place and dawdling centre for valetudinarians will rise into repute with all the million worshippers of their own infirmities from every nation of the earth. If Holloway pocketed four hundred thousand pounds by merely providing a little aloes and jalap and a little coloured hog's lard for these gentry, how much more shall sweet little, sympathising, lovely, artful Rotorua make by offering everything to everybody, boiling up sulphur for the rheumatic, and arsenic, lime, potassium, silica and everything else that may be desired by invalids of every kind, kindly making mud puultices for gouty and paralytic ones, and working everywhere like an awful little hospital nurse, or a busy little affected, pretended French ■washerwoman, who, while making a tremendous display of hard work, is sharply on the look out for trifling with pleasure and a flirtation with any number of lovers possessed of sufficient cash to afford a j sufficient supply of the good things of j this life. Rotorua will pipe unto the j gentle invalids if they will but dance with her, and she will not be long 1 before she decks her- elf out in all the vanities of female allurements that so much excited honest old Isaiah's wrath in tinkling ornaments about the feet, and carols, and round tires like the moon, the chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crushing pins, through Rotorua is but a baby yet and has much to learn. She is a promising young lady though and boasts of two very good inns in Ohinemutu, in which, judging* from the visitors books people of infinite distinction come from far and near to abide, though there is known in every resort of bong tonga miserable and degraded class of snob who weighed down by the consciousness of being only the- Bon of Hogg or Higginbottom, sweep or nightman with a little spare caeh, aspires to the bliss of being taken for a harristccrat and signs his name, Halbert Eddard, second son of the Dook of Montroee, or " Cuthbert Montmorency " tourist fiom England, figures from the fist of Jerry Grub the swell advortlsifip: slop manager of Christchnrch, Dunedfin, Wellington, and Auckland so that one cannot altogether trust hotel visitor's books. Mrs Moirisson's is a house of quiet unassuming comfort and cheerful attention to a visitor's wants, and for the show part of the business if he is of the Hupper ten, the real old colonial blue blood, he should go the other nice hotel, Graham's, that has been enlarged and can boast of a very extensive patronage. These, with one or two cottages an \ a general store or two, contrived out of a simple shanty and without much to boast of in the way of front, constitute the town at present. The land is all Maori property leased to the Government and re-let to settlers, this drawback and the difficulty of getting supplies of any kind, nearly everything having to be brought by packhorses from Tauranga, somewhat retard the progress of the town, though when the new road from Cambridge is completed or the railway brought up to this point, nothing can prevent Ohinemutu from becoming a large and gay town at once. The Maoris are settled all about the shores of the lake, and fully appreciate the pleasuies and sanitary advantages of the springs. The conventional tourist always decently covers his face with his hands when he gets to this part of his narrative and simpers something about Maori full bosomed females in a state of nudity, as he calls it, for the word naked is too strong for him, and then, as his prurient fancies impel him to dwell upon the subject, with many blushes and titters and giggles he laments that most of them are scrofulous or worse. His extreme and feminine delicacy of expression and his poetic sensitiveness prevent him from seeing or owning that the full bosomed beauties are mostly poor old hags afflicted with all cutaneous and muscular diseases simply come there for cure, and the state of nudity need astonish or afflict nobody but a town-bred counter-jumper talking to a chaste barmaid. The sights afforded by any English fashionable place till very lately would have left him very little to blush over in the ideas of the Maoris, while the higher study of the classical and Babylonian or Egyptian statues and friezes in the National Gallery, the British Musexim, or the Louvre, and the language of the old Bible itself might have taught him that better people than the conventional New Zealand tourist have seen nothing to simper, or pretend to blush ovpr in a naked human being, or anything suggestive, except to' a filthy, biijf cracked voiced boy, or an old man in h% second childhood. The gallant heroes offea and bun fights should'nt creep about places where their modesty is likely to be ahooked, and, if it is, they should'nt talk 1 about it afterwards so sweetly. I caw nothing myself about the lake, or the -springs, or the Maori settlements likely to snook any but the indecent. Through the «£|**a of the township, by the road from tbe.-ppsir 00 ® 06 ' au^ court-house to the hbtels, a 'hot oreek borders the road, and the 'itonin' from which riies over the ti-tree BdHlb,,and » step or two through the snrub brings on£ to several hot pools of considerable extent, which some large bath-rooms iriU doubtless cover before long. Close td tfcfe tiso inns another steaming aulphnrop.jftpjdng muddy pools that t have been ttaeaii. J The Vxtre'me simpliciiy of, its j ttttUße of its remarkable - economy, j fbiwrb'of it** 1 ' promotion -of comfort' <%ittfrt> s bathew. ' -'The: ' general style »&tD* > & fc»4m oblong hole ■of six feet by |taee or «o, Awaked by i 'Uv? oW fcwndy

oases and covered or not by * wooden shanty or an old ttmpv Maori whare. The hot prater trickles in from the spring over a simple removable board forming a dam, and enabling the bather to increase the warmth- of his ablations at will Here the distinguished Brown and the world renowned Jones, lie for a oertain number of minutes, two or three times a day, and emerge apparently much refreshed and relieved from any symptoms of rheumatism, with which they may be afflicted. There are many of the springs about though, and open to the air or only hidden by the scrub, with a far admixture of the various chemicals with which these waters are impregnated and of far greater efficacy in the removal of stubborn old chronic complaints and the care of violent cases. It is decidedly debilitating to a perfectly healthy person to take these baths, and I felt the effects of my only dip for the remainder of the day, in the form of a violent headache and general lassitude, just below the hotels and the residences of the Colonials, lies a large Maori pah. The wharves are still clustered together in the old dusty, smoky, flea • harbouring style of huts or pigsties, in which the Maori fondly delights, and for which he is always ready to abandon the best weather board house — but in the centre of the settlement is a large meeting hall for Maori koreroes that attracts the attention of a visitor from its size and substantial timber construction, as well as by the elaborate carvings and old Maori decorations with which the front and the roof are adorned. The sides of the eloping roof, 'the sides of the doorway, and the interior of the sort of porch or outer hall over which the roof projgcts, are all faced with carvings of huge grinning rude pourtrayals of the supposed likeness of various heroes, beloved chiefs famous for their inexhaustible capacity for stowing away the carcases of their enemies in their own insides, or for like merits, and divinities or demons of certainly a most demoniacal style of beauty, whopiobably are supposed to be j the guardians of the subterranean boilingdown establishments that are so actively carried on here. The artists have evidently devoted immense care and endless time to these great works ; the eyes being rendered brilliantly expressive by the mother of pearl-lining of the mussel-shells found about here, and the grinning mouth being neatly decorated in some instances with the genuine teeth of the departed hero whom the carving is supposed to represent. By the fresh light of a cool, rosy morning, the lake looked marvellously beautiful as I took my first stroll along its shore, and noticed the extraordinary little hot springs that every here and there seem to break through the sand just for a time, and then to cool down or change their blow-hole again, just a puff or two of boiling steam and a slight heating of the ground for a fast round, and no more. Occasionally the water in a circle of a foot or two diameter on the surface of the lake would burst into bubbles, as if boiling violently or discharging gas. On putting my hand into some of these, I found them much warmer than the general body of the water, and in some cases almost unbearably hot. These escapes of heat below the surface of the water are said to render bathing in the lake highly dangerous ; and possibly, if a bather happened to get into one, he -would find himself nearly boiled before he knew it, or obliged to walk home with nothing to cover his bare bones ; but I took a very plea&ant swim myself, and came out none the worse for it, though the water was decidedly very acid to the taste, and caused the eyes to smart. The lake generally appeared delightfully cool, and there are some large golden fish, or a sort of red carp caught in it, and I could see some small fellows of the tittle bat or whitebait species that were remarkably active, but in places the temperture chauges suddenly to about boiling heat, I am told, though, perhaps, tbeie may be exrggeration about that as about other things. The swamps of hot, linking, daik brown water and mud around the lake render it decidedly usafe to attempt to stray a foot from the pathway, for a piece of tolerably firm looking ground may *be anywhere only the thin crust over a boiling hole, into which anyone setting bis foot on the ground would sink out of sight into boiling water. A Maori is to be seen about the town who slipped one night last Christmas up to hiships in such a place, and the consequences were such that he is still obliged to walk with crutches. Everywhere, there where thousands of wild ducks and long-legged swamp birds of different kinds, that looked like good eating, and would, make capital shooting. The sulphurous steam rising here and there was not pleasant, and lent to the whole district the smell nnd something in the whole temperature of a large washing establishment, and one expected to come across some gigantic demon wat>her woman " hanging out, "or doing a nip out of a forty gallon cabk of gin, or having a wirein of bad language and slapping fi&ts under one another's noses. However, the sweet creatures did not reveal themselves to me and my companion. (To be continued.)