I'm going to begin my final Kiwi blog entry with a question that has followed me the entire way around the country, and is one that my fellow travelers would surely have thought at one time or another - WHO IS PAM???! The mysterious Pam deserves a medal, for without her budget cooking would be nigh on impossible. She makes and sells tuna, bread, cheese, pasta sauce, shower gel, nappies, you name it and good old Pam probably does it. If I could meet the woman wh...

By winterless North I mean Paihia in the Bay of Islands, and Cape Reinga, the northernmost tip of New Zealand and where the Tasman sea meets the Pacific Ocean. I had added this onto my ticket when I'd booked it as it seemed like a nice place to end my trip in, and it's a good job I did as otherwise I would have had over a week in Auckland, which seems a bit much, particularly after the one slow afternoon I spent there before the minibus up to Paihia! It was ...

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...