Driving into the outskirts of town we were greeted by the sight of steam rising into the darkening sky, seeping out from the earth itself. Scary stuff. We knew that there were geysers and hot springs and fueroles (where steam rises straight out of holes in the ground) in Rotorua, but we hadn't quite imagined just how many there were or how widespread they are. They're all over the place! The whole town is built on angry land. We drove through neigbourhoods where every house has a 6 foot pipe stuck into their front yard with billowing smoke coming out of it, and on our last night in town a bus driver pointed out where they had had a 'mini-eruption' 2 years ago by the side of the road in a small park. Surely it can't be sensible to hang around here?!

For some reason, instead of doing the obvious thing and getting as far away as possible, early Maori tribes saw the smoke, explosive water and bubbling mud and decided that this would be a nice place to settle down in, making Rotorua the spiritual centre of their culture. With this rich history to draw upon and ever increasing numbers of tourists to satisfy, Rotorua has become something of a 'Maori Disneyland'.

The worst of this was our trip to a 'Maori Cultural Performance'. I suppose we should have guessed from the name what it would be like. Started by an enterprising couple of guys called the Tamaki Brothers (who are apparently pretty gangsta according to the locals) in the 80s, the company drives tourists out to a reconstructed 'traditional Maori village' where Maori actors demonstrate the Haka and some other traditional rituals and entertainments before piling everyone into a large dining hall for a Hangi (earth oven cooked) buffet dinner. It felt like Butlins, and not in a good way. Sarah and I were less impressed by the performances than by the business. It cost around 100 NZD each, and in summer they can cater for up to 700 people a night, 7 days a week! Well done the Tamaki boys.

We breathed a sigh of relief when we boarded the bus home, only to discover that worse was yet to come. Our 'hilarious' bus driver forced all passengers to sing, by nationality, on the ride home (Sarah and I belted out a passable Welsh National Anthem having not been able to come up with a 'typical English song' Aside: What would you say is a typical English song? Aside from that dirge of a National Anthem? Answers on a postcard...) and when someone refused – a pair of petrified young Japanese women – the bus was driven around and around a roundabout, six times, until someone helped them out. Oh what fun we had...

Our best Maori experience was a visit to the hot springs to see the geysers Pohutu and The Prince of Wales' Feathers (thus named when the man himself visited and claimed that water spraying from the geyser looked like his heraldic badge). As well as telling us a bit about the history of the hot springs, our guide Mel was a font of information about the early Maori settlers – from how they made warm clothes from plants (as there were no cattle or sheep in New Zealand when they arrived), to the symbolic significance of the various buildings in a traditional settlement. I was interested to find out that for the first few hundred years after they arrived from Polynesia the Maori were a very peaceful people. That was until they had hunted all the easy prey to extinction and had to start fighting for land to farm.

Rotorua has been a tourist mecca for over a hundred years. The biggest leftover from the Grand Tours of our predecessors is the Victorian Bath House, where well-off foreigners used to come to 'take the waters'. By all accounts the Baths were awful, even by Victorian standards. Not only is the water so corrosive that the place had to be shutdown one week after opening to clean all the pipes – the first of many maintenance issues – but the treatments they devised were absolutely horrific. Our fave was the 'electrified bath' which involved the strategic application of direct currents to people's baths. Apparently good for treating those with a nervous disposition.

Nowadays the building serves as the town's museum. As well as seeing some of the original bathing equipment, we also saw a great exhibition about the All-Maori B Battalion's exploits during WW2, as well as an awesome video about the volcanic eruption of 1918 which featured a young Bret from Flight of the Conchords as a British tourist who gets killed when his house collapses.