Kawaha Point Lodge A Select Ho Rotorua

... hand drive cars, even the weather... When I walked out of the airport, the heavens opened and it was bloody cold. A bit of a shock to the system having just spent a week in the 30+ degree desert, I walked out into 14-15 deg. <br>I drove for a couple of hours and got to Hobbiton, a little place stuck in the middle of nowhere - the film set for the Shire, home of Bilboan Frodo Baggins ... I had ...

... all the snobbery you find in Europe. There's also a wierd tale about a knitting shop, a man called John and a driveway but no time for that here.<br>Er...I've been going on for ages but there's MORE FOLKS.Caught the ferry over to Wellington where we hooked up with the lovely Kirsty and Stu at which point we abandoned the van and enjoyed a room of our own and took massive advantage of K and S's great hospitality and tour-guiding skills. As well as supplying us with huge ...

... kilometers in order to get all the people, animals, and equipment out to the set. They were on the land for a year making it look like hobbits had lived there for a long time, putting fake plumbs on apple trees, and even transporting a large tree and gluing on thousands of leaves to make it look like an oak tree! No expense was spared and no detail was left out. Most of the hobbit holes are just facades, but we ...

... meantime, the Alexander family drew up agreements with Newline Cinema for the right to preserve what was left behind &amp; commence tours of 'Hobbiton'. <br><br>Sorry for babbling about the makings of the movie! I'm sure I've bored some of you to tears, but I'd never previously considered the amount of work &amp; effort that went into making a movie of this scale &amp; found it really interesting :) <br><br>After Hobbiton, we drove on towards Waitomo ready to begin a caving trip the next morning.

... as its beautiful around here! A lot of the locals tend to stay away from Rotorua because of the pungent egg smell (from the sulphur). We could smell the city from about 20km away! Yesterday we went to a place called the Polynesian Spa which was voted one of the top ten health spas in the world from 2004-2007. For 20 dollars you have access to seven hot spring pools which overlook the lake! We stayed for about two hours which was nice for the sore muscles!

... in NZ to be as **** as the one in Auckland that's why we were so happy when we got to Crash Palace. Our first night in Rotorua was quiet enough as we just chilled out in the common area of the hostel and watched films. We slept in pretty late the next morning so by the time we had figured out what there was to do in Rotorua we realised it was too late in the day to do most of it. We did take a stroll around town and found an Easter Sunday market where we ...

... the front of the raft and gee was he mad for it joining in with all the maori chants, Ruth also eager to take on the rapids telling the guy in front to get on with it and paddle properly, the poor Dutch guy nodded getting the message. Once over my fears the experince was fantastic. We all got into it, James jumped over board for a swim and Ruth enjoyed going head first repeatedly into a rapid and I stood up whilst going down one of ...

... of the unassuming bee. One could buy honey (8 types), propolis, pollen, honey wines, honey liqueur, sweets, aioli, cosmetics, candles, magnets, postcards and so many other things, all made of the honey and the wax the bees produce. G couldn't pass on the honey &amp; honey wines tastings while L tried all the cosmetics testers available, the end result being that she smelled like a walking beehive as she came out of the store :-) We continued on our way to ...

... 2. MATERIALS : All varieties of meat, poultry, vegetables and steamed puddings can be cooked in the hangi. The preparation of the food is the same as preparing food to be cooked on an electric stove. The food should be prepared and put in containers that should be placed within easy reach of the hangi. Beef, lamb, pork, poultry, potatoes, kumara, pumpkin, can all be cooked in the hangi. Green vegetables are better cooked in conventional ways. 3. Gear Check List : Stones When ...

... Usually in these situations the crowd goes quiet in fear of being picked, however this time a man looking incredibly like Jimmy Tarbuck stuck his hand up. As you will see from our videos the resemblance is quite uncanny - yet this Liverpudlian did get stage fright a couple of times and didn't work the audience too well. Though I had attended the same performance some years prior, the performance had changed and the food was far more enjoyable. On our final ...