Saturday 6th /Sunday 7th December : Tauranga and Rotorua

There are some things that you do when travelling that are fairly normal, the sort of things you would do when back home……just because you live in a foreign country does not mean you have to tick off the tourist spots all the time. Lesley has been keen to visit 'Hobbitown', so we think that it would be good to see 'The Hobbit' film before we go. There is a screening in Tauranga and the Matinee is attended by an audience of about 40. Watching this epic, filmed in New Zealand, ties up the fantastical scenes of fiery dragons, giants and mountains that take on the form of humans to battle out their grievances, to Maori legend. Have we not been brought up with the concept that hills, rivers, volcanos, seas and earthquakes happened simply by geology? The Maori belief is that their ancestors and gods created this earth, long may that continue as it opens up a very bountiful imagination and gives us a bit of culture to be harnessed as films, music and books.

Rotorua is pretty much on every tourist's track in North Island, and you could spend a few days here. We only have one day here, and the first thing we do on arrival at the holiday park is to soak in a hot tub. The ground gurgles in places and you would not dare to put your hand into the hole for fear of being scalded. After dark we visit 'Rainbow Springs' and see our first Kiwis, which are nocturnal.

Monday 8th December : Mangakino

Our home for the next two weeks! This sleepy little town of 1,600 where we've ended up of is not even mentioned in our 700 page comprehensive NZ guidebook. Mangakino sits in rolling forested hills with a few cattle farms on the lower ground. Lake Maratae, created by a dam for hydro-electricity, is a kilometre away. What a difference to Wanui Beach and Gisborne. Most of the houses that line wide streets are wooden single storey, in their own little plot of land known as a 'section'. You could pick one up for $ 75,000. Many of the curtains are drawn, and there are few cars outside or parked in the streets, you can go a whole morning with only a couple of cars driving by. The main street, if you could call it that, has one newish line of shops, a council office, a club and a library, a community centre, and that most essential of recreational items found in every NZ town, a skateboard park. Folk seem to keep themselves to themselves here, but one wonders what they do all day. Is it a modern 'Hobbitown'? The Practice Manager has kindly turned out to show Lesley around the practice and get us settled into our home. The surgery is only 6 minutes walk from the house. Our accommodation is a bit more basic than Wanui Beach, but it's got all we need (apart from an ironing board and a spaghetti strainer…….all essentials for the house husband!). No internet either, but the public library has a free service.

As I walk in to the library for the second time yesterday, the two ladies at the front desk are happy to engage in conversation as I'm becoming a regular after two days. I guess in a town of 1,600 it only takes a few minutes for a stranger to get noticed. 'I'm back', I say, 'went up to Totaroa and bought a dongle' (the library's internet is switched off when they close, so you can't sit outside and get free bytes and with no internet in the house it's useful to have and we can take the Vodafone dongle with us on our travels).

'A dongle, what's that?', offers one of the receptionists.

'Well, I think you call them sticks, USB sticks here, y'know for connecting to the internet'.

'Yup, that's them……tell us, do you have one, a dongle under your kilt?', the receptionist giggles. I resist the temptation not to prove the case one way or the other with any sort of confirmation or denial of their imagination (was wearing shorts anyway). They are obviously thinking of Chuck Berry's song 'My Ding-a-Ling'. Let them continue to believe that there might be something under there has the special ability to also connect to mobile broadband J. Let all the girls continue to imagine what's under a Scotsman's kilt!

It's great, it really is, you meet folk for the first time and the humour is what you remember about them!

Now, while I am carrying out all this essential traveller's business, Lesley is settled in across the road in the surgery. It is a single handed practice, so she is the GP for the next two weeks, and she is glad she has worked in a multi GP practice in Gisborne for 7 weeks before coming here. Bedevilled by a printer that doesn't work, she can't ask the practice manager for any help as she is being sworn in as a new Justice of the Peace today. So consultations take 5 minutes more as the prescription needs to be printed on the receptionist's machine and it doesn't take long for a patient backlog to build up. After Lesley sees her first few of them, it becomes clear that she has to take a firm line with one or two chancers. Quite probably a few will want to wait to be seen by their own GP when he returns, but we suspect that the other side of the coin is the patient or two who turn up hoping that the locum will be an easy rollover for their requests that they know their usual GP will turn down. Can't go into details, but suffice to say that in the UK if you have had a fit you are not allowed to drive for a year, this particular fellow wants back behind the wheel after 2 months. In this part of the world, Lesley is assured, there are thousands of Kiwis driving around who should not be. Yup, it's the old pioneer spirit, no Nanny State here thank you.

Wednesday 10th December

It is Lesley's half day. Armed with our knowledge of 'The Hobbit' from the film, we drive for an hour and a half to the film set. On arrival, the ticket clerk discloses in hushed tones that there's a problem, she won't tell us, but it's 'not too bad', and calls her manager. Now I see why delightful, smiling pleasant girls get the job of explaining that your tour is cancelled 'due to an oversight'. It turns out that our tour and dinner in the Dragon's Rest has been bounced by another VIP tour, probably as the third film is due to be premiered in world cinemas that night…….strange how the girl who took Lesley's booking a few days ago didn't know that. Anyway, the 2 hour tour around the Hobbiton set was recommendable enough and we got a full refund, a couple of sweet cakes and two commemorative boxes with Hobbiton cider and ginger beer and a couple of decorated china mugs. At $ 35 each they were definitely overpriced in the first place if you chose to buy them.

It's no bad thing really, as the jokey receptionist had recommended 'The Loose Goose' in Tirau on the way home from the film set if we were passing, so after a bit of a wait for the local golf club to finish their Christmas dinner, we're served very tasty food.