JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

New Zealand is beginning to annoy me.

The sky is too blue. The water is too clean.

The foliage is too lush; in fact the green is too green and the flowers too flowery. The air is too fresh and contains too much oxygen.

This is a lake in Rotorua. It looks like the locations in The Lord of the Rings movies where the Uruk-hai are running alongside the boats (the Argonath would be further ahead).

We rode around the lake on a boat (Lack of detail due to alcoholic stupor—the wine is too good) and the crew caught some trout which they grilled and served at lunch (too fresh). On the other side of the lake, in the forest, is a shallow pool of hot water. “Leave your shoes on the boat. There are small stones on the path, but you can walk barefoot,” the captain advised us, cheerfully. We followed his advice, and on the 5-minute walk (which would’ve been 30 seconds with shoes) we sounded like this: OW! OWW! !@#$%^&*()! OW! (My companions wish to emphasize that they were not cussing, I was.)

It was like walking on broken bottles. Strangely no one else seemed to have this problem, and found our torture amusing. (We don’t walk barefoot in Metro Manila, are you insane?) When you get to the pool you’re supposed to sit and dig your feet into the the little stones, and the little fish flitting about eat the dead skin on the submerged feet. Naturally my next thought, which I knew better than to vocalize, was “What are those?! Piranha?!” What we did vocalize, since the rest of the group were not Tagalog speakers: “Ano yan, parang lubluban ng kalabaw.”

We did enjoy the dip, and only later noticed the amended sign by the hot water pool:

I remembered all those stories about explorers tramping about the Amazon who end up with intestinal parasites 40 feet long.

Clearly I am having a fantastic trip. You can tell because I am complaining about the fact that I have nothing to complain about.