Last day in New Zealand

The Ramada in Tuam Street is a bit of a strange hotel. Strictly speaking it's an "aparthotel" since we had a little kitchen and washing machine as well. It is surrounded by empty sites where earthquake struck buildings have been demolished but not yet rebuilt. It looks like Docklands twenty years ago before it was finished.

This morning we carried out our final pack, and I squashed everything back into my suitcase that I brought with me, plus one Kiwi souvenir. After packing the boot of the Corolla we had breakfast in a trendy cafe bar, which would be very at home in Shoreditch. I suffered from beard-envy after seeing some of the luxuriantly forested chins of local hipsters. If I grow my beard long I just look like a U boat engineer after three months at sea without access to soap.

Wandering our way to the half-destroyed Victorias cathedral, we joined a walking tour of Christchurch. Our guide was engaging and informative, and showed us the better side of the city we hadn't seen before. Today the city was back to normal after the holiday, so it was considerably more lively. There are some beautiful new buildings being constructed, and the street art on every corner shows how proud the local people are of their city.

Lunch was sushi from a stall in the shipping container shopping mall called Restart, I'm getting a taste for Japanese lunches. Our final tourist trip was to the Christchurch Museum in the Botanic Garden. It has a delightful exhibition who works in the medium of corrugated iron, a very Kiwi medium.

So here I sit at Gate 25 waiting to be calLed for our flight to Melbourne, then on to Dubai and London. By the time I'm back in London I may have forgotten how to walk properly.

So farewell  New Zealand,  I have had a truly wonderful time here.

Christchurch cathedral and its absent tower

Tromp l'oeil mural next to a construction site

The new transitional cardboard cathedral 

RestRt shipping container shops

Banks Peninsula

Tuesday 9th February

We wanted to get out of Chrstchurch yesterday. The weather was overcast and cool, the city deserted because it was Waitangi Weekend (a bank holiday), so we took the highway south to the volcanic Banks Peninsula. Captain Cook thought it was an island when he first surveyed New Zealand, only later was it discovered to be connected with the coastal Cantebury Plain.

The main resort is Akaroa, a very pretty town on the huge Akaroa harbour. A French sea captain took a fancy to the area, and returned to France to recruit some settlers. But the time they sailed back to Akaroa the Treaty of Waitangi. Had been signed and the country was  British dominion, which must have been a bit annoying!

The Peninsula is very mountainous, with small settlements around its periphery. The sparsely wooded green mountains and twisting roads are like the Peak District, and there is a steady stream of traffic heading to or from Akaroa. The town has French place names reflecting its origins, but it doesn't look French. It is more like Salcombe or another pretty south Devon resort, with a similar mix of cafes and expensive tat shops. Tat is anything I'm not interested in, such as souvenirs, overpriced clothes, art, and fragrances. It would be a struggle to find shops I am interested in to be honest.

But the buildings and location are very quaint and well looked after, so it was worth the visit. The cruise ship Noordam was in the harbour, and orange boats ferried elderly tourists back and forth  to Akaroa.

I found a jet boat trip I was prepared to invest my hard earned cash on. The jaunt was $75, which was $50 cheaper than anywhere else I had seen. Julie sensibly didn't fancy bouncing over waves, so I joined nine other tourists and sped around the harbour at fifty miles an hour, holding on very tightly. Jeez it was good fun, genuinely thrilling. The driver put in some very tight turns at the end, so I was grateful for my lap belt.

On the drive back to Christchurch we stopped at Birdlings Flat, which is a long gravel bank like Chesil Beach flanked by cliffs like the red ones at Westbay. An angler caught a Seven Gill Shark about sixty centimetres long. It was a damned ugly fish, and he chucked back in again.

For our last dinner in New Zealand we dined at Valentines, which I can highly recommend if you are passing! We had seafood chowder, followed by lamb shank washed down with local Pinot Noir. Damn it was good, so good I had to have some Gaviscon.

Banks Peninsula is like Derbyshire

I'm leaving on a jet boat

Akaroa lighthouse

Birdlings Flat

Hells teeth! It's Horncastle!

Sunday 7th February

It was another four hour drive from Twizel to Christchurch through a variety of landscapes; cowboy country, alpine views, wheat fields and arable farmland. Near Lake Pukaki were rewarded with a distant view of Mount Cook, twelve thousand  feet high and draped with glaciers glistening in the morning sun. The lake is a vivid blue, which is caused by suspended particles of glacial dust refracting the light.

The arid scrubland changed into verdant pasture with grazing sheep, cattle, deer and alpaca (in different fields, obviously).   Birds of prey are a common site, as are road kill, which I'm sure the birds feed on. There are plenty of dead possums, but today I saw a wallaby by the side of the road. The fields are irrigated with huge wheeled metal gantrys that's stretch across the fields and spray them with water, some of them must be a quarter of a mile long!

Once we got past the pleasant market town of Fairlie, the countryside looked really English. The closer to Christchirch we got the more it looked like the Fens betweenPeterbrough and Boston. That means flat and boring. The familiarity was compounded when we reach the Christchurch suburbs and saw the Horncastle Arena! It's the only other place I know named after my home town, I must find out why.

Christchurch is a sad city. The heart of it was destroyed in the 2011 earthquake, and there are many empty "bomb sites", fenced off buildings, and building sites. Also it's really really quiet! It felt like 28 Days Later, there was hardly anyone there! It was a real struggle to find somewhere to eat, there were so few restaurants in the middle of a city of half amillion people. 

But the Botanic Gardens were very good, lots of nice trees n' shit.  Also we did find a good offy and bought some stonking Pinot Noir to quaff in our room. However the radio and TV in New Zealand is consistently awful, rubbish, crap and shit. The radio is either dreadful phone ins or lousy pop music with wall to wall local adverts. The TV is the worst of American and British programmes and terrible films. 

But we still have the Pinot Noir...

 Mount Cook over Lake Punakaki

Cool murals 

Poignant  memorial to 187 dead after the Christchirch earthquake 

Giving my best "Blue Steel" a la Derek Zoolander.  It's hard being really really ridiculously good looking

Twizel - a real place not a cartoon character

Here I sit in the McKenzie Country Hotel, our fifteenth hotel since we arrived and they are beginning to blur a bit now. We had a long discussion over dinner about where it was we stayed in Rotorua, I think it was an Ibis. 

Twizel is a strange little town halfway between Queenstown and Christchurch, and was constructed as accommodation for workers building a dam in the sixties. So not much here apart from hotels and eating places, and a really daft name!

On the way we stopped in Arrowtown, a former mining town with a few pretty old buildings that lives off its heritage. It is like Ambleside with sunshine and merino mink shops. Merino mink is a bizarre New Zealand fabric made from merino wool and the fur of  possum, an Australian marsupial which is a pest here.

The most interesting part of Arrowtown is the end of town where Chinese miners lived in Victorian times. They were impoverished farmers from Guangdong who came to New Zealand to try and find enough gold to buy a farm, but most never got back to China. They built themselves shacks and grew vegetables in gardens which they sold to fellow miners.

Next along the route was a suspension bridge over the Kawarau river which is a major bungee jumping centre. We watched a few suckers spend two hundred dollars in a few seconds, but that is several good meals or a big chunk of gas bill! 

The road to Twizel took us through Lindis Pass, a winding road through semi desert scrubland that looked like the southwest of the USA, this really is a country of  contrasts.

Bungee jumper (he's about halfway down)

Chinese miners shacks in Arrowtown 

The Lindis Pass

Milford Sound

Milford Sound is one hundred and nineteen very windy kilometres from Te Anau, and there are no settlements between them at all. The road was very quiet when we set off at 7am this morning, driving past forests and between lofty snow capped mountains. Towards the end of the journey we climbed up to the Holm tunnel and went into very thick cloud. The road twisted and turned and the visibility was dreadful, so I took it very slowly round the hairpin bends. The tunnel slopes down, and has traffic lights to allow one direction of traffic through at a time. It is unlined, so feels like driving into a downward sloping mine!

After one and a half kilometres we emerged into the sunshine and wound our way down to the boat terminal at the head of Milford Sound. There is a huge car and coach park to accommodate all the visitors, and a small but busy airport for light aircraft and helicopters flying people in from Queenstown.

Our tour boat was the Milford Adventurer, one of the smaller ones tied up at the last of the eight quays.

The Sound was originally discovered in 1805 by a Welch sea captain who had come to hunt fur seals for their skins. Captain Cook had sailed past, but didn't see the entrance which is hidden from the Tasman Sea. It was originally named Milford Haven, but in the mid nineteenth century was renamed Milford Sound, even though properly it is a fjord rather than a sound! The fur seals still live in the Sound, and sunbathe on rocks while flicking away the pesky sand flies.

It was carved out by repeated glaciations, and is now a mighty trough with towering sides clad in forest. Mitre Peak rises from the Sound to a mile high, it is truly awesome! Because it had rained last night, there were many waterfalls tumbling hundreds of feet into the Sound. The captain of our boat got very close indeed, and some people at the bow got a good soaking. 

It didn't matter too much, because we had glorious sunshine and blue skies, very lucky considering they have eight metres of rain a year! 

On our return our boat edged beneath a concavity in the cliff caused by the glaciers, so we could look upwards to see trees growing out of the cliff above us. The forested cliffs and waterfalls looked just like Pandora in Avatar, literally fantastic and one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited.

Sound as a pound

Rainbows in the waterfall

Mitre Peak

Snowy peaks

Time I had a shower

Stuffed in Te Anau

Thursday 4th February

I have just eaten  too much fetuccini with venison ragu, and it's sitting like a brick in my tummy. There is a very good selection of Italian restaurants in Te Anau, and La Dolce Vita was our choice. There are many deer in these parts, both farmed and wild, so venison is common on menus.

Te Anau is a small town on a big lake with many hotels and restaurants. It's main claim to fame is as a stopping off place on the way to Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound, which are part of the Fjordland National Park. Chinese tourists love New Zealand, so there are several big Chinese restaurants to cater for them and Chinese New Year greetings signs in the ticket agencies.

It's a five hour return trip from here to Milford Sound, so it better be very good! A young man who was the dead spit of Daniel Radcliffe sold us the tickets. Maybe the acting jobs have dried up and he couldn't face working in MacDonalds so got a job in a ticket agency in Queenstown.

Back to food. Restaurant prices are a bit cheaper that home. My fantastic fetuccini was twenty five dollars, about twelve quid for a huge bowl of pasta and braised venison. The beer was ten dollars for a pint of good lager. But an English pint is 568 Millilitres whereas a NZ pint in 425 Mls, so it works out more expensive. Wine is also a bit more expensive than at home, it must be the buying power of our big supermarkets that pushes the price down.

To pass the time on long drives we have been listening to podcasts of a Radio 4 serial called Tumanbay. It is a drama based on the Mamluke Slave Dynasty in medieval Egypt, and is like Game of Thones for radio. It is the best radio drama I have ever listened to, and I can highly recommend it. The entire series is available on Radio iPlayer. Ain't the BBC a marvel?

Seaplane at sunset 

Julie and a big bird

Chillin' by the Lake

Wednesday 3rd February 

Today we had a lazy day, doing mostly what Londoners call fark orl. We got up late, scraped in just before they stopped serving brekkie in the Copthorne, and took a leisurely drive to Glenorchy. This village is about 40 minutes up at the head of the lake. There is bugger all there apart from a few cafes and souvenir shops, and the usual jet boat and helicopter tour shops. These genre of tourist trap are very popular in these parts, helicopters are as common as wasps round here!

I had a swim in the lake which was refreshing but warmer than the Thames in summer and much warmer than the English Channel. Then we had a walk around the lagoon and saw a few ducks and black swans, much the same as the the lake in Kew Gardens. I am underselling the place because once again the views are gorgeous, snow capped mountains over a blue blue lake.

Our investment in hotel wifi as worthwhile, because I Facetimed my brother in Lincolnshire and Josie in Twickenham. It's Josie's 24th birthday today, so everyone should email or FaceBook her to say happy birthday!

Tim semi naked and 'avin' a dip 

Sunset clouds over the lake while we have dinner on the balcony 

Queenstown for a gondola ride

It's a five hour drive from Franz Joseph to Queenstown, so we got up early and were away by seven fifteen. Our route took us past the Fox glacier, so we just popped in to say hello. Since it was still stupid-o-clock we were were the only people in the car park for the viewing spot, and got an exclusive with Mr Fox.

The road south towards Haast gave us more wonderful views of the coast and thick rainforest. The drives have really been a very enjoyable part of the journey, for much of it we didn't see another car. Most of the bridges crossing the many rivers are single track old steel bridges with road beds made of timber. So before every bridge there is a sign telling drivers who has the priority. Some of the longer bridges even have wide crossing places in the middle.

The coastline roads are very windy with frequent hairpin bends, the speed limit sometimes dropping to twenty five KPH. If you get stuck behind a truck or camper van, you have to wait for the overtaking lane.

At Wanaka we passed the National Museum of Toys and Transport, and I saw a Canberra bomber in the grounds and thought I would take a look. It has a vast collection of 50,000 items, including over 600 vehicles. We discovered old cars that either we or or relatives owned, including Fred Brackenbury's Vauxhall, Bill's Humber Snipe, and Reg's Ford Anglia. Martin Frith would love the motorbikes, they had his BSA Goldstar.

Once we got through some mountain gorges the forests disappeared and the land became scrubby, looking more like Arizona than New Zealand! Vineyards started proliferating, and I'm quaffing a fruity Sav ( Sauvignon Blanc) made locally.

Queenstown sits halfway down the zig zag shaped Lake Wakitipu, an enormous 1200 foot deep glacial   lake. It is like Bowness on steroids, a very popular tourist resort full of thrill seeking youngster and coach parties of Chinese tourists.

After checking in a the Copthorne we had a wander round town in the hot sunshine, and watched jet boats, parascending boats and old steamers plying their trade on the huge lake. Saving the best until last we took the cable car (known as the gondola) up Bobs Peak and were rewarded with beautiful views of Queenstown, the lake and the Remarkables, a range of 7,000 foot mountains across the water. They turned pink and were slowly cast into shadow by the descending sun. 

Nice.

Vineyards

Queenstown lake front

 A steamer on Lake Wakatipu

On the gondola with views of th Remarkables

Franz Joseph's icy welcome

Monday 1st February 2016

The drive from Punakaiki to Greymouth is supposed to be one of the ten best drives in the world, and it is definitley the best I have seen. There are green forested hills on one side, and sandy beaches with rocky outcrops on the other side. The road winds around the coast and the speed limit frequently drops to twenty five kilometers per hour, you don't want to meet a big timber truck on one of those bends!
 In Greyport we avoided the fast food outlets on the highway, and stopped at a high street cafe for a flat white and a BLT. The food was so good we got some take away sandwiches for lunch.
There are several deer farms by the road, but we have seen surprisingly few sheep so far.
The village of Franz Joseph services the tourists visiting the glacier, named by the German explorer Julius von Haast after the Austrian emperor.
The glacier is a forty minute walk from the car park next to the river that flows from its base. It is one of the few glaciers in the world that terminates in sub tropical rain forest. We walked to within half a mile of its base dressed in tee shirts and shorts. It isn't safe to go closer due to falling rocks and ice, and people have been killed doing so.
The glacier has retreated miles since it was discovered in 1867, but is still an impressive sight flowing from the top of the valley. It is bluey white in color and shone brightly in the sunshine like a great nylon shirt washed in Persil Automatic! The are some lovely pictures of Victorian ladies in long skirts and big hats walking on the glacier, even then it was a big draw for tourists.
We bought walking shoes especially for our trip to see Franz Joseph, but there war plenty of muppets who thought at flip flops were appropriate footwear for walking up steep loose gravel paths.
There is a thriving business in helicopter flights to visit the glacier. The landing field is close to the hotel, so we went to have a look at them taking off and landing. There was a swarm of eight of them, ferrying tourists for flights over the Franz Joseph and neighboring Fox glaciers. One crashed at the Fox last year killing the pilot and two English tourists.
Dinner was at Alice and May's restaurant overlooking the snowy mountain peaks, a lamb shank has never tasted better!

Scenic coastline

Julie and Franz

Tim and flat man

Mountains from Franz Joseph village

South and west to the Pancake Rocks

Sunday 31st January

Our next destination after leaving Nelson was Punakaiki, home to the famous (in New Zealand) Pancake Rocks. To be honest it doesn't sound much of a draw, but it is a handy stopping off place on our progress to the west coast.

We took Highway 6 through flat fertile valleys with plenty of cows, and forested mountain sides. Some of the forests are cultivated pines, which are periodically clear felled to leave naked scars on the mountains. In other places the native forest has been left, or has regenerated after mining has previously cleared the trees. The native mix of local beech, tree fern, pines and palms is dense and lush  and rushes with the white noise of insect and songs of birds. I love it, I can't get enough of the rain forests!

The small town of Murchinson had a good caff, a not-so-good museum and a useful petrol station. A few miles beyond is the Longest Swing Bridge in New Zealand. It's a foot bridge suspended between cables across the fast flowing Buller river, originally built for gold miners crossing to look for gold in the river gravel. It's narrow and springy, and a bit of a squeeze getting past people half way across. 

I took the fast return trip on a seated zip wire, which was fun and about as close to an adenaline ride I shall get this holiday.

We followed the Buller river all the way to the mouth at Westport, a coal mining town on the coast. It has a broad sandy beach scattered with drift wood, and a line of camper vans facing the sea. It also has a splendid Liquormart where we bought some cold Sauviignon Blanc and canned G&T, essential supplies on a long journey without pubs. 

The coast road from Westport to Punakaiki provided a succession of beautiful views of coast and forested limestone cliffs, with slight haze created by the waves crashing onto deserted beaches.

Our hotel at Punakaiki is almost on the beach, and as I sit here I can here the sea a couple of hundred metres away. But if there is a tsunami we are stuffed.

Unwisely we opted to eat at the Punakaiki Tavern, a nearby pub with a sign up on the wall saying that dope smoking and swearing would not be tolerated. That should have warned us about the quality of the establishment. I had the worst sausage and mash I have ever eaten. The mash was reconstituted Smash, and the sausages were practically vegan, like tofu turds. Julie had "hot smoked salmon" that tasted of kippers. The Punakaiki Tavern is truly a shitty shitty pub, don't go there!

The Pancake Rocks is a limestone formation by the sea made up of thin layers of rock like a stack of American pancakes. They were definitely the crepe rocks or galette rocks. Where they were eroded by the sea they looked like oversized clints and grikes from Malham Cove. The Chinese tourists looked very impressed, which is nice.

So we comforted ourselves by watching the sun descend into the sea and drank a tin of gin and tonic

Punakaiki sunset shots

Journey to the Centre of New Zealand

Saturday 30th January

Nelson is a small city with its own cathedral on a hill and container port on Tasman Bay. It has an enviable reputation of being one of the sunniest places in New Zealand. Our hotel, the Trailways, is situated on the Maitai river which runs through the town. It has a pathway along side it that we walked to the Botanic Gardens playing field where then first game of Rugby was played in New Zealand. 

A zig zag path leads from the playing field through forest up a hill to the Centre of New Zealand, which is a trigonometric point with a wonderful view of Nelson and its surroundings

It isn't exactly the centre, but is the centre of the most central district in NZ, but is near enough. We trod carefully coming down from the hill, since Nelson is an special place in Harness history.we  were in Neslon British Columbia in 2012 when Julie slipped coming down from a hill called Pulpit Rock, broke her leg and had to be evacuated by helicopter!

After a lunch of sushi we drove to the local beach where I took a dip and Julie complained about getting sand in her iPad, a very modern sort of complaint. I just got a sandy bum, a very ancient sort of complaint.

The State Cinema is a lovely Art Deco building that has been converted into a multiplex. We saw Brooklyn, which was the best film I have seen in a long while. It is beautifully shot and acted, and very funny in parts, a real work of art.

I cooked my own dinner for a change. It was a steak that came with a block of basalt which had been heated to four hundred degrees. I cut bits off my steak and cooked them on the hot rock. I didn't have to cook my own chips and veg, that would be a step too far!

Nelson is a lovely town that I could spend more time in.  But onwards and southwards, we must press on to Punakaika!

View from the Centre of New Zealand

Selfie on the beach

The wonderful State cinema

Found a good pub in Nelson!

Friday 29th January

This morning we took the Interislander ferry from Wellington across the Cook Strait to Picton on the South Island. We picked up a fresh car from Avis, a Toyota Corolla exactly the same as last one! 

Choosing scenic and bendy over straight and less interesting, we took Queen Charlotte Drive towards Nelson on the northern coast of South Island. 

The road hugs the coastal cliffs and is very windy and uppy downy. The views over the coast are spectacular and reminiscent of the "fiords" in Montenegro, forested mountains running down  into narrow bays. The steep road took us almost up into the clouds, and the pine clad mountain look like Scotland.

Nelson is a pretty town at the mouth of the river Maitai running into Tasman Bay. The central area is about five hundred metres square, so it's very walkable. It has a well deserved reputation as the craft beer capital of New Zealand, so naturally we had to try them out.

The Free House is a free house, which is not tied to any brewery so it has many different beers. It has a similar vibe to the Sussex Arms in Twickenham, and is very popular. The Cassels bitter I tried tastes like Pride or Doombar, but costs about six quid a pint! In Trafalgar Street Macs  Brewhouse drew us in with their offer of a drink and burger for twenty dollars, which is under ten quid. Their Gold lager is very drinkable and their burger a savoury masterpiece, with crisp golden fries. Bloody hell Im getting fat, but it's worth it!

Nelson is a city because it has a small cathedral and a bishop, although he wasn't in the pub this evening. If you like good beer and good food, it's a great place to visit.

The view from Queen Charlotte Drive

Giant bugs in th Free House pub

Macs Brewhouse

Touring Windy Wellington

Thursday 28th January

The temperature today was about seventeen degrees, and the sky was grey and cloudy, just like and English summer.  We took a walking tour of Wellington with a pleasant by earnest lady who showed us the major sites of the centre of Wellington. There are some nice old buildings, but lots of ugly modem ones as well. Many old ones have been shaken down by earthquakes or taken down because they aren't safe in an earthquake. The most interesting building is the old Parliament, which is the largest wooden building in the Southern Hemisphere.

The guide did witter on a bit, so two hours was enough education. The cable car on LambtonnQuay took us up the hill to the botanic gardens (I do love a good botanic garden) and we wandered through Norfolk Island Pines, Monteray Pines and Redwoods to find a top notch caff in the rose garden where we had tea in a conservatory out of the drizzle. The walk back to the waterfront took us through the cemetery, which has been bisected by a motorway, about four thousand skeletons were removed to make way for the road, 

The most colourful street is Cuba Street, which is full of trendy cafes, bars and ethnic restaurants. There are still lots of Victorian buildings surviving there, although some are a bit tatty.mthey make up for it by being painted in bright colours and with murals. It has a feel of Camden or the North Laines of Brighton, but not so crowded. We were spoiled for choice looking for somewhere for dinner, and chose the KK Restaurant, which serves Malay food. The food was fantastic, and really cheap, I'm now a big fan of eating out in Wellington. 

At th top of the cable car ride

The national dish

Colourful buildings on Cuba street

Why does always rain on me?

Wednesday 28th January

We left a sunny Taupo and headed south down Highway One towards Wellington, five hours of driving and a six hour journey with breaks. Driving is easy in New Zealand, the speed limit is 100 kph and the roads are never really busy compared to the UK.

Our journey took us through some stunning countryside and spectacular views of volcanoes. At least that's what the guide book said, all we saw was lots of mist and very heavy rain! We did catch a glimpse of Mount Ruapehu through the clouds and on the the distant snowy peak we saw Frodo and Sam Gamgee being pursued by Orcs.

We passed through several small towns, which look more like rural America than England. They have a strip of shops and fast food outlets along the highway, and will never win any prizes for outstanding architecture. Corrugated iron is a major feature of many buildings, even civic buildings and churches have galvanised roofs. They even make sculptures out of it beside the roads. Taihape, a small town halfway to Wellington, has a sculpture of a big welly boot beside the road, since it is the self proclaimed gumboot capital of the world! 

Since we were in a hurry and hungry, breakfast was at MacDonalds and lunch at KFC, please pray for our souls. It's hard to find muesli and fruit when you are driving with a mission.

Arriviving in Wellington at about two o'clock, we checked into the Ibis in the city centre. Wellington is much smaller than Auckland, and I immediate liked it. The waterfront is only a short walk away from our Inis hotel on Featherstone Street, and the old harbour buildings have been converted into restaurants and the city museum. The main attraction on the harbour is Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand. It is a modern well laid out and fascinating museum. There is a new exhibition to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Gallipoli, a battle where many thousands of ANZACs died. Huge realistic sculptures of the soldiers tell the story, they look so realistic  it is very moving.

After getting our fill of facts we went to be entertained by watching the Revenant. The bear attack scene is too realistic, I couldn't watch It all! We left the cinema exhilarated and exhausted and hungry. Walking down Willis Street we found the Great India restaurant. I had a Bhuna Josh and Julie had a lamb Birynani, and it was THE BEST INDIAN MEAL I HAVE EVER EATEN. No doubt about it, the best.

A great start to our visit to Wellington.

Wellington harbour city centre

Mural showing the Jolly Fisherman and his girlfriend

Hot and stinky country

Tuesday 26th January

Rotorua is a tourist resort by a lake in central North Island. Its primary attraction are the volcanic activity parks, where there are pools of bubbling mud, smoking fumaroles and lively geysers. We visited a park in the suburbs of Rotorua called Te Puia, which is also a Maori cultural centre. The volcanic stuff was quite good, but not that exciting to be honest, bubbling mud doesn't do it for me. We skipped the cultural show, having overdosed on ethnic dancing in Vietnam.

Back on the road again we drove through more hilly Telly Tubby countryside towards Taupo, which is another resort town on the shores of Lake Tapau. The lake (according to the guide books) is the same size as the island of Singapore. Singapore has a population of four million, which is the same a New Zealand. That illustrates how few people there are in New Zealand, four million in a country the size of Britain.

A few miles outside of Taupo is the Huka Falls on the river Wairekei, where 220,000 litres of water (that's 220 tonnes) crash over every second. The water is unusually blue, so the falls are quite a spectacle. The other great thing about it is that it's free to view. Result!

Taupo it's self appears to have been built in the seventies on a grid pattern, the architecture is truly dismal. It's full of restaurants and motels, and is a popular holiday destination, and the views over the huge lake are gorgeous.

 After checking into the Suncourt Hotel (it's actually a motel) we walked over the road to a narrow beach skirting the lake. Julie settled down to read and I got my goggles on and went for a swim. The water was clear and warm (ish) but with out anything interesting to see. The lake is supposed to be a trout fishing paradise, but they kept out of my way. I did find two golf balls on the bottom of the lake which I shall keep until I take up golf. Later I found the source of the balls. There were half a dozen young men whacking golf balls off a green carpeted platform trying to hit a pontoon floating in the lake. The were entertainingly bad, and golf balls went flying in all directions.  Julie asked if I wanted a go, but I wasn't going to make a tit of myself in front of lots of people. Hitting balls in straight lines has never been one of my core skills.

Diamond geyser

Going off alarmingly

Huka falls

Hobbiton and forest giants

Tuesday 26th January

After a hearty breakfast we loaded up the Corolla again and headed south down Highway One towards Rotorua. It should have been a straight forward journey down Highway One, but I got a bit lost somewhere in the countryside near Hamilton. In that part of central North Island it looks like the Lincolnshire fens, flat without many direction sight.

We are both fans of LOTR and the Hobbit films, so we went Hobbiton, or at least the set of Hobbiton near Matamata on  the Alexander family's far. The country is peculiarly hilly, many small hills with dry valleys between, Peter Jackson thought it looked like Tolkein's description of the Shire.

Hobbiton attracts about a thousand people a day and according to our guide about a third of them have neither read the books or seen the films! A coach took twenty five visitors from the reception to the set, and David the guide showed us round the set. For the original LOTR films, the hobbit holes on the set  were built out of plywood and polystyrene. When Peter Jackson filmed the Hobbit series, there were reconstructed in proper wood, stone and brick. None of the holes has a proper interior, and the chimneys are kept smoking using fish smokers brining manuka wooed chips. The village did look very beautiful in its setting, and the Green Dragon pub and water ill were freshly thatched.

The day was very hot, and I had to shelter under an umbrella to stop myself from getting more frazzled! It's a hard life being a semi-ginger.

At the end of the tour we were given a drink in the Greeen Dragon, which is a proper cozy pub inside. I have an excellent Amber ale, and Julie had a cider.

Rather than head for Mount Doom, our journey took us next to Rotorura, a tourist town on the lake Rotorua. Having spent a long time in the car, I wanted to chill for a while. Our first stop was Lake Takitapu, for a swim and watch speed boat bombing round the lake like mad wasps. A couple of miles back towards Rotorua is a park described simply as "the Redwoods", but that does not give it justice. It is a forest where the government tried out different species of trees to see which grew best. The Californian Redwoods did spectacularly well, and now there is six hectares of massively tall trees, interspersed with tree ferns. The trees stand up to seventy two metres tall and one hundred and sixty centimetres in diameter.

What made the forest more special was the noise of the cicadas, which sounded like an invisible high pitched buzz, the loudest bugs Inhave ever heard!

I love big trees, so for me it was the highlight of another fantastic day in New Zealand.

Stooping like Gandalf in a hobbit hole

The Hobbiiton watermill

In the redwoods forest