Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/136

80 town, controlled by the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts, and has been since 1907.

"Tenakoe" (Hello)!

It was a welcome to the sulphurous heart of the Arawa country that greeted me. The Maoris at the station seemed glad to see me, but they were not half so glad or effusive as the mob of hotel and boarding-house keepers and bus drivers beside the railway gate. There were nearly enough of them to populate a town.

As I went toward my hotel an odor of sulphur was wafted to me. It came from the sanatorium grounds by the lake shore, and the steam columns I saw in the same area rose from the artificial Malfroy geysers in a concrete basin.

Before sight-seeing in Rotorua I wanted a bath. Nothing was easier to get. I could have had scores of different kinds of baths before bedtime had I desired them. Rotorua is one of the cleanest towns in the world, for everybody there bathes frequently. In the midst of its bathtubs and pools the professional tramp would feel woefully out of place. Every morning before breakfast I saw men and women with towels on arms or shoulders on their way to bathhouses. Verily, if cleanliness be next to godliness, Rotorua must be especially near and dear to the gods.

As the baths of Rotorua are many and varied, so also are the places in which they are housed. They were offered to me in low, unpretentious buildings; in the Duchess, opened by King George V of England when he