It was time to catch the inter island ferry. Linda dropped us off at the terminal, gave us our tickets, and went to load the bus on the ship. It’s hardly necessary to say we weren’t the only ones waiting; the place was packed. Eventually, the announcement came that boarding had commenced. We weren’t in…
The Gallipoli exhibition at Wellington’s Te Papa gallery is hands down the best such presentation I have ever seen. Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) troops, along with British, Indian, and French soldiers, landed on beaches along the Dardanelles in Turkey on 25th April, 1915. It was an ill-conceived campaign, badly led. The ANZACs…
From Napier our Ultimate coach took us south to Wellington, our last stop on the North Island. The city is New Zealand’s capital and has been since 1865, supplanting Auckland in that role. In Australia, Canberra was created halfway between Melbourne and Sydney to end the rivalry between the two cities. In New Zealand it…
We had breakfast in that award-winning restaurant at the Regent the morning after our long day in Rotorua. Most hotels offered buffet breakfasts but this one was a la carte. Which is fine if management and staff have some plan for delivering meals to patrons; that is, the person seated in that place at table…
No trip to Rotorua is complete without a visit to the geysers. After we’d finished our wonderful show at the Agrodome we went to the Māori Cultural Centre at Te Puia where we met a lovely young lady who was to be our guide. This visit wasn’t just about geothermal manifestations, it was to educate…
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…
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,…