Location: Rotorua, Bay of Plenty
North Island, New Zealand
After Auckland, I started my trek south and stopped in Rotorua. Rotorua is aptly named. It smells….rotten. The city is known for its geothermal activity. Geysers, bubbling mud pools, sulphuric lakes. You name it, it’s here. The city is built around the Rotorua caldera (created post volcanic eruption), the source of the thermal activity and interesting smell. With all the sulphur in the air, you can imagine what it smells like: rotten eggs. I’ve never been so happy to have a cold and resulting stuffy nose! Luckily, the town is quirky and fun and sits on a beautiful lake! 
Lake Rotorua
You can see by the yellowish hue of the rocks that the area has sulphuric activity…. beautiful but stay away!
Dear uncomfortable traveller,
Like a geothermal burst of steam bursting from cracks in hardened lava, long-suppressed memories of my ages-ago car trips through the sulphur stinky pulp-and-papermill town of Thurso, Quebec spewed to the surface of my consciousness. Despite the unpleasantness of this olfactory flashback, your interesting post motivated me to further my knowledge of the geographical area of Roto-rua (or its modern spelling as the unhyphenated “Rotorua”). My research discovered, ironically enough, that very little is known of the true source of the unpleasant smell that permeates the air in Roto-rua. Giggle Translate to the rescue: the nearest English equivalent to “rua” is “rooter”. Thus Roto-rua becomes the less exotically sounding “Roto-rooter”(yes, like the plumbing company).
Accorsing to Kiwipedia, Maori linguists point to an interesting etymological association with the colloquial descriptive “rotopweupweu” or “stinky drain”. Knowing what we now know, we can probably all guess what the Bay of Plenty means: time to call Roto-rua!
A quick postscript: before any Canada-is-better smugness gets put on display, let us remind ourselves that Victoria and Halifax drain their untreated toilet effluent directly in the waters of their respective ports. Pweupweu indeed!