Friday 22nd February

We were woken in the night by the rain beating against the roof – not a good sign although I’m sure the farmers were clapping their hands. It was still raining a little when we got up and for the first time, it really felt cold. We got the fleeces ready and the waterproofs and while I washed up from breakfast, Tom drove to where he can pick up a signal and posted yesterday’s blog. It’s only about 1km from here so doesn’t take long. They must be wondering what the funny man is doing parking up and sitting in the car outside their motel – but he hasn’t been detained for loitering yet! It’s a good job it’s not a school.

We set off, still in rain, at 9.30am, to Matamata, northwest of here, to visit Hobbiton. Since most of the LOTR sites no longer have any of the film sets in situ, this is the only one where there is anything recognisable to see. There are LOTR tours (at great expense) to some of the off-road sites but all the scenery has been removed. The drive was uneventful except for the rain (!!) until we were on the approach road to the farm. The council are doing improvements to the road and in their usual way, just left it in the state they’d reached the night before! Being a farm road, there’s lots of mud around – and it was all on the roadway. It certainly makes for unpredictable driving conditions, you have to keep your wits about you. However we arrived at 10.40am, bought our tickets, had a coffee and waited for the bus that would take us on the tour. On time, it arrived with just enough room for us to climb aboard. The others had been picked up at the Tourist Office in Matamata itself.

We enjoyed the tour very much, and for those of you LOTR fans, I’ve written a separate section describing what we saw. For those others, just carry on reading and ignore that section.

It had stopped raining except for the odd little flurry while we were on the tour, but was so windy we almost got blown away, although it wasn’t really cold. As we were going on to Tauranga on the Bay of Plenty afterwards, we hoped this was a good sign, but as we are the rain makers, we drove towards the coast in increasingly wet weather – in fact, it positively poured!! Tauranga town centre is at the end of a long spit of land reaching out into the Bay and as we approached, all we could see was driving rain. Tom said we’d drive to the Tourist Info then decide whether it was worth having a walk about the town – which we did, and lo and behold, as we got to the car park, it cleared up! However, visibility was still very poor so we couldn’t see much and walking along the sea front was a fight against the wind, so we gave up, found a secondhand bookshop and bought ourselves some reading matter. We couldn’t even see Mt Manganui which is stuck on the end of the other spit of land that is part of Tauranga.

So we drove back to Rotorua down what started off as an unexceptional road (SH36) then became somewhat exciting for a short stretch, getting very narrow and dropping down through a gorge between Mangorewa Forest and Te Matai Forest before straightening out again as if nothing had happened and leading us into Rotorua. We drove past a very steamy area which is marked on the map as Free Access Thermal Area, so if the weather is OK, we’ll pay it a visit in the morning on our way out to Auckland.

It’s now 11.00pm and it has stopped raining but we’ve had an evening of high winds and pouring rain again. I just hope that we don’t have that all the way tomorrow on our last stint of driving in NZ, but we shall have to wait and see. Night, night again.