New Zealand, Pt 2.

From the morning call at the Auckland Museum, we headed South on our first real drive to Matamata, home of The Shire. What should have been a fairly non-eventful journey was hindered by the distinct lack of road signs in New Zealand, and the fact that their major roads never appear to be particularly major.

I mean, seriously, this is their equivalent of the M1. And there are no road signs on any junction.

So, taking a somewhat long way round, with breaks in numberous towns along the way (mainly Hamilton – we drove through there at least three times), it was getting late by the time we reached Matamata. So late in fact that we’d missed the last tour by half an hour. Always looking to please though, the local farmer phoned the chap who organises the tours, and he was more than pleased to call a coach back to show us round. He was even kind enough to let us feed the hand-reared lambs while we waited (click for photo).

So, taking the minibus to the hobbit-holes, we found out quite a bit. The farm was chosen since it already had a huge “party tree” by a lake, which Tolkein demanded be in The Shire, and was spotted by Peter Jackson as he flew across the New Zealand skies looking for the perfect location. Originally, it was meant to have been taken down by the NZ army immediately after filming, and returned to it’s former state as farmland. This was the fate that befell all other Lord of the Rings locations, but bad weather delayed the removal of the Shire by several months. In this time a number of Rings fans turned up to ask if they could see Hobbiton, and after much negotiating, rights were secured to show tourists around the set of Bilbo’s village. Unfortunately, as the upcoming filming of The Hobbit requires the set to become live once again, I’m not allowed to show you any photographs that we took. I should be OK with this though;

Suitably amazed, we headed on down to Rotorua, just about managing to avoid Hamilton this time (though only just!). The next day, we had something of a relaxing time, strolling down to the Lakeside to check the views. Following that was a nature stroll through Rotorua’s famous geothermal areas – bubbling puddles and pools of sulphury water, which look stunning, but smell like bad egg. As we walked along, they just seemed to get more impressive, and every information board told a new story, my favourite of which was that a by-product of some of these pools is Nitrous Oxide, or laughing gas to me and you. This led to the European settlers who bathed in these spending hours sat in a foul-smelling, bubbling pool unable to stop laughing at absolutely nothing.

We do have a photo that we were ready for, but I actually prefer the comedy of this one.

After our very casual walking, Chris, Emily and myself decided to try some local fish and chips (or in my particular case; fish, wedges and onion rings), which turned out to be both wonderfully tasty, and delightfully cheap, rounding off a very relaxing day. And relaxing was the way to go, ready for what was planned the next day…

Yep, invented in New Zealand, and enjoyed by each of us. Strapped in to a giant bouncy ball, and rolled down what feels like a much longer hill, constantly just seeing sky, ground, sky, ground.. is more than a little unsettling, but a lot of fun. The voice you hear is Stephan, and he reckons he went further. It’s all lies, I somehow managed to take a different route at the bottom, and obviously went further.

With one must-do crossed off, we hit the road again, continuing South to Tongariro National Park, and the home of Mordor from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We’d wanted to climb it, but the NZ weather had other ideas…

If anyone asks though, we ran all the way up. Also, there is a prize for anyone who can correctly pronounce the name of the mountain which stood in for Mount Doom, Mount Ngauruhoe.

Finally, from there, it was on to Windy Wellington – and to Wellington I award my special prize of “I hate driving in your city”. Arriving late at night, in rain so heavy that we could no longer see road markings, and a one way system so complicated that not even the locals seem to understand it, it took almost 40 minutes from entering the city to drive the remaining 2 miles to our hostel. We eventually reached the ridiculous situation of having to park before and after every junction, just to check we were headed in the right direction. Even now, I don’t fully know how we reached our hostel, but we did finally manage it.

Sadly, there is where I leave my story for now, as it is late, and I wouldn’t want to bore you. I’ll try to add another update through the week, I have plenty of photographs to reference now.

And finally, from the Zorbing, this well timed photograph of my post-zorb jump does make me chuckle;

Even more finally, here’s a few little stats for you… We travelled a total of approximately 1,691 miles in New Zealand. You can probably add another 50 miles to this for the number of times we got lost, and time spent driving in cities. This is over 3 times the length of Britain. Over two-thirds of this driving was done in the South Island.

This link is the route we took through New Zealand, while this link shows how far you could get travelling 1,691 miles from my house in Billingham, which includes places as far apart as Greenland, Finland, Turkey and Libya.