Day 68 (Wellington to Ohakune, 298 km):

Saturday morning, we caught an Uber back to the airport to get our rental car. We had a date with a drive from Wellington to Auckland with some very fun stops in between. Saturday was bitterly cold and drizzly when we left Wellington. It rained most of the day and spoiled several outdoor activities we had planned, but not the most important one. No, I’m not saying yet. Wait for it. It is coming in just a few paragraphs. No peeking!

Our route took us from Wellington through Paraparaumu on the west coast and then inland to Ohakune at the base of Mount Ruapehu. Paraparaumu has a view of Kapiti Island out in the Cook Straight. And it has a terrific museum, the Southward Car Museum.

Southward is named for Len Southward who, along with his wife Vera, established the museum. He was a mechanic, engineer, boat racer and manufacturer who collected cars. His collection has some fascinating originals with history. For example, the futuristic car from Woody Allen’s 1973 movie, Sleeper. I remember seeing that movie when I was a kid. It was such an odd movie; it made a powerful impression on me. I was stunned and thrilled to find the car in this museum.

Mickey Cohan was a gangster in Los Angeles who worked with Al Capone. He had a Cadillac modified with bulletproof windows, armored doors, and bomb proof floor. It may have kept him from getting killed on the street. It didn’t keep him out of jail for tax evasion.

Maybe you recall the actress, Marlene Dietrich. The name was vaguely familiar to me. Faith, of course, knew exactly who she was. She was primarily a silent film star from the 20’s and 30’s. Yup, IMDb is our friend. Marlene’s 1934 Cadillac V16 Town Cabriolet was included in Southward’s collection.

After the museum, we stopped at the beach in Paraparaumu for a look-see. The rain had stopped but the window was blowing a near gale. So, Faith stayed in the car while I looked. What I saw was Kapiti Island and a beach that was strewn with logs and branches. I’m guessing the crazy wind was common. Branches, trees and other junk seem to regularly wash ashore.

We left Paraparaumu and drove on to our motel in the town of Ohakune. The drive was some of the greenest land we have seen outside of Ireland. The landscape was a mix of slow rolling hills, small mountain peaks with the occasional flat valley. This was sheep farmland.

After we checked into our hotel, we had a nice dinner of Italian food a few blocks from the hotel. The weather had improved significantly throughout the day. The wind had dropped off, it was sunny and almost warm. Almost. The forecast for the following morning was more muck. And we had an important stop planned for that morning. It was only a 30-minute drive. Granted, we would drive that same route again the next day. But we could do it. I mean, sunset wasn’t until 8:45 PM and it was only 6:30 PM when we finished dinner. What else was there to do? Sit around and stare at the mountain. Or get in the car and go get our LOTR on again.

I’m sure you have guessed by now. We hopped in the car, and we scrammed. We wanted to get to the spot before it got too dark. In the mountains, the sun can hide even when it hasn’t set. We wanted to be able to see Gollum’s Pool at Tawhai Falls. Per dozens of sources online, this is the spot where Farimir watched Gollum dive and swim for fish. It was a forbidden pool and Farimir threatened to kill him if Frodo didn’t help to capture him.

Okay, so I’m not convinced this was the film spot. All the online sources I found point to this spot. Even Google Maps labels it as Gollum’s pool. It is tough to see from which perspective they shot the scene. It wasn’t from where we got the picture of me (and many other folks online). But, darn it, benefit of the doubt. I suspect they may have been further around to the right from where I was crouching. Here’s a terrific redo of the scene by a YouTube user. You be the judge.

After Gollum’s Pool (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it), we went back to Ohakune and drove up the side of Mount Ruapehu to watch the sunset. It was a nice end to the day.

Day 69 (Ohakune to Rotorua, 251 km):

By Sunday, Day 69, I was driving Faith crazy regarding our day’s destination. Our planned stop for the next two evenings was in the town of Rotorua. The name sort of sounds like Roro-Rooter. So that’s what it was. Pretty much every time I said it. Faith found it mildly funny the first two or three times. By the 20th time, she was beginning to glare at me.

If you have a partner of more than four or five years, you may know the look I’m talking about. You’ve learned by then what their buttons are. Most folks are wise enough not to push those buttons too often. Replace the word “wisdom” with the word “logic” and as Star Trek’s Spock once said, “Wisdom is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Wisdom is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad. Are you sure your circuits are registering correctly? Your ears are green.”

Our first non-food stop on the way to Roto-Rooter (Okay, okay, relax! Sheesh!) Rotorua was Lake Taupo followed by Huka Falls.

Huka Falls are on the Waikato River north of Lake Taupo. The river flows from the lake to the Tasman Sea on New Zealand’s northwest coast. It cuts a narrow channel through the rock just a couple of miles north of the lake. The water thunders through the channel and over a small drop. The falls are not impressive for their drop, but for the massive volume of water that flows over the 30-foot drop. 53,000 gallons per second. 200,000 liters. In 87 minutes, the falls would fill up the entire volume of the Empire State Building, 37 million cubic feet.

The area between Lake Taupo and Rotorua is riddled with thermal activity. Driving along the road, you can look out into a random farmer’s sheep field and see steam coming out of some random vent that is fenced off on their property. We saw this dozens of times along the road. It was the thermal activity that drew us to Rotorua for this part of our trip.

After the falls, we made our first geothermal stop was at Orakei Korako. If you have ever been to Yellowstone, you may recall that there are different geyser basins. For example, the Upper Geyser Basin has the Old Faithful geyser and dozens of other lesser-known geysers. Orakei Korako is like a smaller version of one of those. There are at least five or six of these different parks in the area between Taupo and Rotorua. And almost every park charges a fee.

It costs $35 for a carload to get a standard pass to enter Yellowstone for all the basins. Or you can buy a $70 national parks pass and visit virtually any national park all year long. Not the case in New Zealand. The parks are individually owned and managed. It was $100 NZD ($55 USD) to enter Orakei. It would have cost us another $90 NZD to go to Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland. We ended up paying $190 NZD ($103 USD) to tour Te Puia in Rotorua. Yes, it isn’t cheap to hang out in New Zealand.

Okay, I’m putting my cheapskate back into my wallet and tucking that in my pocket. We had a great time at Orakei Korako. And it was worth every penny we paid. Even if I would have rather paid $35 for all the parks. Oops, sorry about that. My wallet fell on the floor while I was typing, and my cheapskate fell out again. I have it secured back in my wallet and my wallet is snug in my pocket. We are good to continue.

Orakei is accessed by a quick boat ride across the Waikato River. The site has boardwalks throughout. There are 30-some geysers at the site and at least one geyser-like pool that boiled over while we were watching (maybe that was one of the 30, I don’t know). Picture layered plateaus of sulfur and silica overflowing with red, yellow and green streams of steaming water. Can you smell the aroma of sulfur? Some folks say it smells like rotten eggs. Rotten eggs are much worse. This is tolerably pungent.

Can you see the small blue-green pond, colored by the various minerals bubbled up from deep within the volcanic earth below? That is the Diamond Geyser. And around the corner you find a pool of boiling water. Do you notice the blooms of green and red microorganisms? Species that are adapted to the hot temperatures of the water flowing around them.

We spent around two hours at Orakei and then rang the doorbell for the boat to pick us back up. Yes, it was a doorbell button rigged to a radio that called them back over. Fun stuff. We got back to the other side of the river and were walking to our car when we decided to stop for a couple more pictures. It was precisely then that Kurapai Geyser high above the lake began to erupt. The geyser is in an area not accessible on the tour. It was an amazing eruption.

As I alluded to earlier, we thought about visiting the Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland. It was too late for our Sunday drive. I was curious if it was going to be worthwhile seeing on Monday. I did a bit of research and found that the primary geyser eruption at the park is phony. It is induced when an employee dumps something into the pool (online they call it soap though I’m skeptical of that).

Tourist-pandering, faked-up geyser-ing was not what I had in mind. While I was looking, I found a suggestion that the mud pools outside of the park were free. And they were open 24x7. Well, now! That’s our kinda touring. Go at our own pace and keep the dime. And it was just a ten-minute diversion from our route to the hotel in Rotorua.

The mud pools were good fun. It was as though somebody took a small, muddy pond and put a gigantic stove underneath it. The mud boiled and hissed. Now, this place, this place smelled bad. Real bad. Like awful, really bad. Those rotten eggs I mentioned, they were all stuck inside the mud before the stove was turned on and they were exploding one-by-one. Pretty. Interesting. Smelly. Still fun. 

Day 70:

I haven’t mentioned it in this blog entry, but I was getting slowly worse with the cold that started in Wellington. Day 70, it was in full blossom. The first of two peaks (so far). I went to bed the night before feeling poor with the fountain of youth blooming in my nose. I woke up feeling bad. I earnestly wanted to visit Te Puia with the Pohutu Geyser. I avoided cold meds all throughout the prior two days trying to see if letting my nose flow would flush out some of the virus (yes, I’m talking about a runny nose in the blog…happens to everybody).

Maybe it did a bit. Maybe not. Either way, I was feeling poorly enough on Monday that I gave up on the whole, let it flow business. I took some meds, ate breakfast and drank four or five glasses of fluids (water and orange juice). This promised to send me to the bathroom frequently (yup, now I’m talking about the toity), and the hope that it would keep me from getting dizzy from the sinus meds.

It worked pretty well. Within an hour I was feeling well enough to get out into the fresh and mildly warming air. The rain fairies were favorable and sent the rainy section of the clouds elsewhere. It was still mostly cloudy, but the sun was peeking through here and there. The weather app (Weather Underground over Accuweather ANY DAY OF THE WEEK) said that it was going to stay partly sunny to mostly sunny until late afternoon at least.

We arrived at Te Puia around 10 AM. The park requires all visitors to participate in a 90-minute tour of the grounds. The park is managed by the Maori native people and is home to the Maori Arts and Crafts Institute. I think the purpose is to ensure that visitors are given a solid Maori perspective on the springs and the native people who lived around them for centuries. After the tour, visitors are welcome to see all the sites at their own leisure.

The tour was worthwhile. Our guide was Maori and she shared about the tribe, the arts and crafts, the geysers and the native traditions related to the geothermal area. We watched students at work in the institute, watched Pohutu erupt and got to watch the kiwis waking up.

If you read our blog from Wellington, I mentioned that Zealandia had kiwis that we couldn’t see because they are nocturnal. Te Puia has a kiwi education and recovery program. Part of the education program is a reverse-daytime kiwi observation center. As it happens, kiwi cannot see in the infrared spectrum. How the observation center works is that they shine full daylight within the enclosures during the nighttime. They dim those in the morning and turn on infrared lights.

We tourists can get to be all ga-ga looking at the kiwis while they walk around thinking it is the dead of night. We were able to watch a male kiwi during the tour and both the male and the female later after the tour. The one catch is that cameras cause big issues for the kiwis. Flash can damage their eyes. I guess even the little lights used for focusing can cause issues. Cameras are completely disallowed inside the observation center. I can tell you they are cute. I can tell you they are furry. I can tell you they look like they have a soda straw stuck in their little tribble heads. I can also tell you that when they walk, it reminds me of Marty Feldman’s Igor from Young Frankenstein. But I can’t show you.

I can show you Pohutu erupting. Before Pohutu erupts, Prince Wales Feathers Geyser erupts sideways to the left for several minutes. Once Pohutu begins to erupt, Wales Feathers spurts intermittently in a water-and-steam dance with Pohutu. I can show you the mud pools. The beautiful blue and green lake that some Maori still bathe in when the temperatures are favorable. It was well worth the $190 NZD for the entrance fee. Darn it! How did that thing fall out of my pocket again? Goodness. As I was saying, it was a super fun park to visit.

As we were walking back to the car, I realized that I had overdone it. My meds were wearing off and I felt like sh…now, now, young man, we won’t use words like that on a family blog. Fine. I felt like shedding shag. Shorn sheep. Shredded shark shank. Sheesh! I figure you got the point of all this shtuff I am saying. I was spent. We went back to the hotel, and I crashed.

Faith was still in a touristy mood. It was around 2 PM when she headed off. She spent a bit of time driving around, getting used to the left-hand side of the road. We had been looking for a decent post card for New Zealand without much success. She didn’t succeed then, either. She did, however, have a fun time riding a gondola to the top of Mount Ngongotaha, walking along the nature trails, and throwing rocks at the folks who were riding luges down the side of the mountain. Alright, the luges were real, the rocks weren’t.

Day 71 (Rotorua to Auckland, 237 km):

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” – The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien.

But I'm getting just a tiny bit ahead of myself. We checked out of our hotel around 11:00 A.M. and went down to the waterfront. I hadn't been feeling well enough to go down to the lake and get a view the past two days. Rotorua has a lovely waterfront on Lake Rotorua (no, that isn’t the department of redundancy department).

There is this funny little thing that happens with some us some of the time. There's probably a word for it. A psychologist would undoubtedly be able to tell me. It's a bit obsessive without the compulsion. It's where I want to achieve something kind of small and seemingly insignificant, and I keep trying over-and-again. It is like ambition or drive, but I'm not talking about something big and meaningful, like a life objective.

In this case, there is a bird that I had been trying to get a picture of the whole time we had been in New Zealand. I managed to get several really bad pictures. None that I would post. In the pictures above from our drive to Rotorua, you’ll see a painting of one. I figured if I couldn’t get a real one, I could at least get something.  

And then on Tuesday morning right there at the edge of the lake, success. A swamphen, or Pūkeko. They are native to New Zealand, and they are nothing spectacular. Nothing amazing. Though, they are an interesting looking bird with black and blue feathers, and a slightly oversized, reddish-orange beak. I was practically giddy with excitement over the great pictures I got of this silly bird.

From Rotorua, we headed west for the day’s grand adventure. Something I have wanted to see since I first heard that it was possible to see it. Hobbiton. The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit movie set of the village of Hobbiton where the characters Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee (Samwise the Brave) lived before setting out on their great adventures. The original movie set for the Lord of the Rings was built in 1999 on the Alexander family’s 1200-acre sheep farm. It was mostly torn down after it was filmed.

After the filming of LOTR, we crazy fans began making pilgrimages to that farm in New Zealand. The remaining Hobbit holes were practically swallowed into the ground, and still we came. When Peter Jackson approached Russell Alexander in 2009 with the prospect of doing the Hobbit and rebuilding Hobbit and rebuilding Hobbiton, Alexander had a recommendation. Build the set as a permanent installation. Thus was born the current incarnation of Hobbiton.

Visitors view the set on guided tours that leave every 10 minutes from a nearby visitors’ center. Just a short bus ride, and we were walking through this set, and wondering at spots we clearly recognized from the movies. There is the spot where Frodo looked down and talked to Gandalf. And there is the spot where the kids asked Gandalf for fireworks while an old Hobbit first laughed and then scowled as he watched.

There's the door where Rosie greeted Samwise after he returned from the Gray Havens. There is the home of Bilbo and Frodo. There is the lawn where Bilbo and Frodo celebrated their birthdays. There is the lane along which Bilbo dashed to catch up with the dwarves as he headed out for his adventure.

I'm not a fan by any means. No, not at all. Well, maybe a little bit. In December of 2023, a construction crew came in and built two complete Hobbit holes. Most of the other doors open into tiny little nooks behind them. These are complete, 80% human scale Hobbit dwellings. And they are interactive. You can sit at the tables. You can hang out on the couch. You can lie on the bed. You can even sit in the bathtub. There's a full kitchen, a larder (pantry for us big folk), a study, and the roots of a great tree growing down through the ceilings and the walls.

If you are a Tolkien fan and you ever make the trip to New Zealand, either Auckland or Wellington, take a day and go to Hobbiton. Rent a car. Take a bus. Get a tour. Just make sure you don't miss Hobbiton. For the rest of y’all, “I’m not crazy. My mother had me tested.”

We finished out our day with our drive into Auckland. We checked into the hotel, and I crashed while Faith took the car back to the airport. That crazy cold virus was brutalizing me. I barely noticed it while we were in Hobbiton. For that, I will be grateful I think for my entire life.

- See you in Auckland -