Everybody has heard of Rotorua, land of bubbling mud and steaming geysers. But I didn’t know there was a Lake Rotorua. It formed in the caldera of a volcano that erupted about two hundred thousand years ago. The town of Rotorua is on the shores of the lake and we arrived there from Hobbiton in…
Way back in 1998 Peter Jackson, having decided to film Tolkien’s epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, was touring New Zealand, looking for suitable settings for the films’ action. The book’s opening scenes are set in the village of Hobbiton, major town of the Shire in which live hobbits. It’s an idyllic place, a…
Doing a ‘city sights’ tour in a large touring coach is hard work – for the driver, especially as half of Auckland’s city centre roads are disrupted because they’re putting in an underground railway system. But Linda was up to the task and gave us a running commentary as we passed the University, Government House,…
After a couple of days of lovely weather the clouds started to roll in, which was a shame because today we would be boarding a catamaran for a trip around the Bay of Islands. Departure was a bit rushed because we didn’t get our ‘wake-up’ call from the hotel. From then on, lesson learnt, I…
Summer was absent without leave at the beginning of December. We landed at Hervey Bay airport into drizzle and (for us) cold temperatures. For me, jeans were still the order of the day. But that changed, weather being what it is, and soon we had sunny skies and soaring temperatures. Not long after that the…
Coach tours are not for everybody. Of necessity they run to a fairly tight schedule and it’s important that the tour group adheres to the times for the day. Every evening Linda would tell us what time the wake-up call would be next morning, when we should have our suitcases outside our door for collection,…
We left Auckland on Sunday morning, heading north to the Bay of Islands. The coach drove through rolling green hills which had been cleared of the native vegetation years ago. It must have been a huge job. Just how huge was on display at our first stop, the Parry Kauri museum at Warkworth, dedicated to…
Peter and I arrived in New Zealand a day early so we could spend a bit of time with a friend we hadn’t seen in years. It was a Saturday and Auckland was packed for the women’s rugby world cup. We had a wander around the general area but the weather wasn’t great. The sky…
Peter and I have just returned from a long-awaited holiday to New Zealand. Or Aotearoa if you prefer the Maori name. It was a small group bus tour, travelling in a full-size coach which normally seats around fifty. But this coach has roomy, single seats like airline business class seats, ten to each side. Everyone…
I love New Zealand. It’s such a magical mix of rolling green hills, glacier-carved valleys, steep mountains, mist, rain, great food, weird animals. I’ve ticked two more items off the bucket list (Hobbiton and Rotorua), learnt heaps, met people and generally had an overall good time. Yes, there will be blogs but I have been…