Left Auckland heading south into the beautiful New Zealand countryside. He was the range and beauty of the countryside that caused filmmaker Peter Jackson to use New Zealand as the backdrop to his blockbuster Lord of the rings films.

Most of the sets are long gone, but one that remains is the Hobbiton set, built in the middle of the countryside just east of Hamilton. The the village was built on a sheep farm for the first movie and is now one of New Zealand’s major tourist attractions seeing people flock here from all over the world. 

Hobbiton may be a man made magical world but not far away, a real life one exists at the town of Rotorua. Puffs of steam drifts from the drains as you walk the street, mud boils in a ditch in the middle of the park and geysers spray boiling hot water at regular intervals.

Rotorua lies on a geothermal fault, which explains this strange behaviour of the Earth around these parts. The whole thing lies on the edge of a lake which is actually a dormant volcano. luckily it hasn’t exploded for many hundreds of thousands of years.