Such is my luck that the night before my trip to Matamata, home of Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, my camera decided to pack up and break. No warning, it would never be that courteous, no it just refused to focus on anything despite my attempts to mend it by removing the battery. That's the extent of my camera skills so I was very disgruntled and starting to wonder at my luck with such pieces of electrical equipment. I think I would have been a lot less annoy...

Kia Ora! Rotorua, as well as being a central location for several Maori cultural experiences, is also a hotbed of geothermal activity. What this basically means is that the town smells of eggs because of the sulphuric content of the hot pools, geysers and mud pools around. The entire place smells like egg sandwiches. Sometimes it's a strong whiff, others just a slight trace but believe me when I say the smell is there. The Maori name for it, which I can't reme...

The tiny village of Waitomo is home to the glowworm caves and blackwater rafting, two things of obvious interest to a person such as myself. Being an intrepid traveler I eschewed the Kiwi bus which cost too much money and instead organized an intercity coach bus to go to and from this place, which is literally only on the map due to the caves and the tourism they induce. It was the first time I'd gotten a bus in New Zealand that wasn't part of an organized tour...

Reading back on my notes from the journey to Taupo I appear to have literally written a stream of consciousness in my notepad which I will attempt to make sense of for you. On route to the town we passed through Bulls, a town which is very proud of its name and likes to replace parts of other words with the word bull. For example, outside the police station: consta-bull. There was also replacea-bull for a car parts shop. Plus many others, some that worked and m...

Since I was in Lord of the Rings country I figured I may as well treat myself to a tour of the filming locations around Wellington, often called Wellywood by the locals due to the massive impact the film industry has in the area post LOTR. I was being picked up at 8.40 so it was almost a sleep in! I left my entire dorm asleep and went to wait outside reception for my pickup…which still hadn't arrived by 9am prompting a phone call to the office who said I hadn...