Tag Archives: Travel

Kiwi bono?

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Tuesday 17 February 2026 – Apart from the Haka and Brendan McCullum, what New Zealand is best known for is the Kiwi, in all the various connotations of that word – an adjective to describe its inhabitants or its Rugby League team, a brand name for shoe polish (actually developed by an Aussie, but his wife was a New Zealander), a fruit… or the species of the country’s, possibly the world’s, oddest bird. Today we went to the National Kiwi Hatchery to learn more.

I had actually seen Kiwis before, on my last trip to New Zealand, in 1988. I was culturally backward in 1988, but even in those days I knew that Kiwis came from New Zealand, and somehow or other (there was no Google in those days) I found a place then where one could view the birds, in captivity of course, as they’re very difficult to see in the wild, being (a) shy and (b) nocturnal. The place operated 12 hours out of sync with actual time, so that daytime visitors entered a darkened environment in order to see the birds active. I have a clear memory of seeing at least one Kiwi, and possibly even photographing it, but that was nearly forty years ago, my memory has a habit of inventing things and I have no way of finding out if this is true until I get home and can look at the photos from that time. If I can remember where I put them.

So…today, then.

Jane had cleverly averted a major sulk on my part by ensuring I knew in advance that any sort of photography of the birds was not permitted. Kiwis are easily upset by unexpected light and noise, and I (grumpily) accepted that the centre had to be careful because most people (a) use phones, which emit a lot of light and (b) almost certainly have no idea about whether its flash will fire or not, therefore can’t be trusted. Armed with that foreknowledge, off we went.

The first challenge was finding the place. We had an address, but that turned out to be some kind of Māori-themed tourist trap. In the end, Google Maps gave us the place to find, the intriguingly-named Agrodome, which is not a Mad Max style cage fight but is actually a place themed around a family day out on the farm.

The Aardman theme continues once one gets there.

It’s actually quite the operation, running farm tours around what is quite a large area.

They have a variety of livestock, including sheep, goats and cattle. Sheep are their main focus; the gift shop and cafe is housed in the Woollen Mill, where they have an old carding machine

alongside the sales of Pure New Zealand wool in the shop.

They have a pig,

a Kunekune pig (“Kunekune” means “fat and round” in Māori). They also have an ostrich

which has many similarities to a Kiwi – flightless, grumpy and with very strong legs.

This similarity was pointed out on the guided tour that the National Hatchery operates. One is picked up at the Agrodome and taken by minibus to the hatchery centre.

The lass who drove our van was also our guide for our trip

and she did a very good job of explaining about the bird, its environment, its challenges and the role of the hatchery. She also emphasised that photography of the birds would not be permitted before leading us through to where they keep a few (currently three) kiwis in the same inverted time that I saw thirty eight years ago, switching day and night.  As it turns out, it was so dark in there that any sensible photography was simply not feasible anyway, so I didn’t miss out on a photo opportunity.

So: the Kiwi, then. It’s a weird, weird creature.

  • Its feathers are more like hair
  • It has whiskers like a cat
  • In many ways it’s more like a mammal. It has two ovaries; a low body temperature of about 38°C; and marrow in its bones (flighted birds’ bones are honeycombed and hollow to save weight)
  • It is very heavy, which is not a problem because it is flightless. Our guide passed around a couple of fluffy model Kiwis made to weigh the same as a chick and an adult and it was a real surprise: the adult female weighs around 3kg

It is thought to be the world’s most ancient bird, having evolved some 30 million years ago. It developed, of course, with no mammalian predators at all (only avian ones, like hawks or crows), so introduced animals such as ferrets and stoats have wrought much damage to the Kiwi population, and predate Kiwi chicks (though an adult will give a stoat a good kicking, apparently). Even hedgehogs are their enemies, since a hedgehog is not above making a nice proteinaceous meal out of a Kiwi egg.

Ah, yes. The eggs. They are enormous, compared with the bird in which they develop.

Somehow or other, a female Kiwi can develop an egg like that in about a week. An X-ray gives an extraordinary picture.

One wonders how uncomfortable it is for the poor bird to deliver it, but somehow she does, and she delivers it into the care of the male (with whom she is likely bonded monogamously). Then, because she hasn’t had anything to eat for a week because of the size of the egg, she goes off to find food, developing the while a second egg (from her other ovary), which she then also delivers into the male’s care. That is then her job done; she has no further interest in eggs or chicks at all.  The bloke Kiwi has to incubate these eggs for 80 days before they hatch. When they do, the chicks are basically fully-formed Kiwis who need no teaching about how to feed themselves, which is just as well, since the male makes no effort to teach them anything.

There are actually five types of Kiwi; the North Island has mainly Brown Kiwis, about 25,000 of them. The other types are: Rowi Kiwi, about the same size as a Brown Kiwi, but a greyer colour, and critically endangered with around 500 birds at the moment; Great Spotted Kiwi, the largest and toughest, spotted only on the South Island; Little Spotted Kiwi, which is, erm, small, and exists almost entirely in remote island colonies; and Tokoeka Kiwi, the Southern Brown Kiwi, which we might get to see later on this trip as it is not entirely nocturnal.

Unsurprisingly there were some stuffed kiwis for us to look at.  A male

The red tag is to allow tracking. If it’s not moving, it’s incubating an egg, which can be brought to the hatchery

and a female

To be absolutely certain in distinguishing one sex from the other it is necessary to analyse their DNA, but typically males are smaller and skinnier, and females larger and rounder. One can see their whiskers

and (if one looks very carefully) their nostrils, which are at the end of their bills, making them officially the birds with the shortest beaks in the world. It is possible to make a coat out of their feathers

and this would be for extremely high-ranking Māori. It takes a lot of birds to make a coat like that, and, these days, the species is under threat.  The National Hatchery exists to try to increase the chances of survival of Kiwi eggs. There are about 68,000 Kiwi left in all of New Zealand and the nation is losing 2% of its unmanaged Kiwi every year. The Brown Kiwi population is steadily declining by about 1-2% a year. Without ongoing support, experts estimate it will be extinct in the wild within two generations: only 50% of Kiwi eggs in the wild hatch; of those that do, only 5% of the resulting chicks survive to adulthood. The centre has overseen the successful hatching of nearly 3,000 eggs since it came into operation some 20 years ago.

The final part of our tour was to see the support the centre gives for hatching chicks. Eggs are located using a variety of tactics, such as tagging the males – if they’re stationary, they’re likely incubating – to locate eggs and bring them to the hatchery. They are carefully incubated, the chicks are microchipped, checked for health, measured and fed to bring them to the point where they are heavy and strong enough to withstand a stoat and so can be released back into the wild; they are then set free in the same region that the egg was found. This is not traumatic for either the male or the chick, since the former doesn’t care for the latter and the latter is pretty much ready for the wild and hasn’t imprinted at all on people during its time in the hatchery.  It’s a funny old business, but deeply interesting to learn about what they do and to find out how extraordinarily weird these creatures are.

That was our scheduled activity for the day. Rather than relaxing for the rest of it, Jane (of course) found Something Interesting To Do in the evening. That will be the subject of the next post. Heads-up – there will be a certain amount of photographic nerdery in it as well as some pretty pictures.

Mud, mud, gurgling mud

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Monday 16 February 2026 – Having checked in yesterday and indulged in a cup of Twining’s Finest Earl Grey, we found ourselves with a little time on our hands. So we went for a walk. Obviously.

We had a bit of a side trip as part of my tiresome tireless search for an electric toothbrush, because the cheapo Colgate battery-driven number I’d bought in Auckland turned out to be pretty rubbish.  Our walk to Woolworth’s took us past quite a fine mural.

Shame about the graffiti on it, though.  However I know that you will share my (and Jane’s) delight that my search for a toothbrush proved moderately successful!

Our hotel is pretty much beside the lake, so it was a short walk to take an overview. Its geothermal pedigree is on clear display (and, of course, you can smell it, too – there’s a distinct “rotten eggs” niff of Hydrogen Sulphide in the air.

Jane had discovered that there is a walkway beside the lake out to a place called Sulphur Point, so we took it

whilst being sure to be careful because of the not-inconsiderable danger of death that seems to lurk round every corner.

As we walked along, we noted a vast flock of gulls by the lakeside.

I had assumed that the waters of the lake would be too toxic to support aquatic life, but apparently there are fish in the lake for the gulls to eat alongside insect and plants.

The walkway led past some black swans

who were doing the duck dive thing, which I’ve not seen before.  At Sulphur Point there are a couple of pieces of art

“Waters of Rotorua”, by Rory McDougall. No, me neither

lots of gulls, some greylag geese and swamp hens.

There’s also been a strong effort to make the loo look pretty.

It was getting late by this stage,

and the light on the lake was lovely.

We hastened back to the hotel, walking through Government Garden and passing the museum, sadly largely covered in scaffolding and sheeting, but the exposed areas of which look very attractive.

Government Garden is a handsome place

and houses, among other things, a Māori Teahouse.

That was yesterday. Today was set to be Geothermal Day. Our itinerary took us to Orakei Korako, a geothermal park. When I visited New Zealand back in 1988, I based myself in Auckland and explored by simply driving as far as I could on day trips, one of which was to Rotorua, which is when I experienced its heady aroma for the first time. In those days I was neither culturally aware nor in possession of a guide book; all I wanted to see was some boiling mud. If memory serves, I did, although I can’t place exactly where I found it. But I must have seen some, otherwise the angst of having gone all that way and not found any to look at would have stayed with me for those intervening 38 years. So, I had high expectations of a boiling mud persuasion for today.

Orakei Korako is about an hour’s drive from Rotorua, through some typically quirky North Island scenery

and past significant evidence of vast amounts of logging.

It’s astonishing the amount of planting that has gone on of Monterey Pine trees, which are grown for the making of paper, since Eucalyptus doesn’t flourish here. There are impossibly steep slopes covered in these pine trees; I couldn’t imagine how they were even planted, let alone how the logging was done. But, clearly, it is done, and is a significant industry in the area.

Geothermal activity is a brutal thing, involving huge temperatures and pressures (and, I was hoping, boiling mud, of course). Orakei Korako has managed to put an entirely charming and low-key package together to showcase it.  One parks lakeside, and is given a friendly but serious safety briefing (basically not to stray from the  boardwalks, as this can be fatal) when collecting tickets, and is then transported across to the actual brutal bit on a cute little ferry.

The walk round the park takes 60 – 90 minutes, and is very well laid out, with maps and info boards to show you where you are and what you’re seeing.  It was pleasantly quiet, with just a few people wandering about in the park. The boardwalks are easy to navigate,

though there is quite a bit of up-and-down as you pass and view the various sites.

It is a typically “blasted landscape”

with considerable evidence of sulphur, and steam rising in many places, often above boiling pools.

Some areas have names; this, for example, is called the “Artist’s Palette”.

It wasn’t particularly colourful today, but apparently under some circumstances it can be overrun by boiling water, which is an ideal growth platform for algae of a wide variety of colours.

I was feeling that there was a bit too much emphasis on pools of boiling water, when we came across this sign.

So, after a quick look at the cave

we hastened down so I could get my fill of boiling mud, mud, gurgling mud!

If you want to see the mud in action, I included it in this overview video of the place wot I produced,

which also gives a better idea of the scale of the place than any of the photos we took. It’s very nicely laid out and pleasantly uncrowded; we enjoyed our visit immensely.

We had to get back to the hotel in time to be collected and taken to our evening’s activity, a Māori “cultural experience”, a description apt to send a shudder up the spine. Ours was to be hosted at Te Puia, which John at Kiwi Dundee had described as “legit”, so I wasn’t absolutely dreading it.

A bus came to pick us up at around 5.15 for the short journey to the place.

We filed in through the arch and joined a whole heap of people who were there for the evening’s entertainment to witness a Māori welcome ceremony. In real life, of course, it has the possibility of going sadly wrong unless you know what you’re doing, but we had a host marshalling us around; he picked a sucker volunteer from the crowd to be the “visiting chief” and made sure that he didn’t get stuck by an angry challenger.

His job was to approach the pavilion which houses the “natives”.

 

…who come out to look you over…
…and send a couple of chaps down to challenge.
A fearsome display, then…
…placing a token to assess your intent
It’s important to pick this up calmly…
…and retreat. This is the point at which it could go wrong.

Some final display then leads to the visitors being accepted and led into the pavilion. I have video, but you get the idea.

Inside, we are treated, as you might expect, to an exposition of native culture – a welcome speech from the “chief”, singing, dancing, explanation of the cultural and practical significance of dance accessories and weapons, and, of course, the haka, which is probably the single most famous Māori cultural export of New Zealand. If you’re a rugby fan. Again, I have video, so, erm, here is some of it.

It was by and large a jolly pleasing noise, but one thing struck me as unexpected. Not that I wish to accuse anyone of cultural appropriation, but there were a lot of familiar western harmonies in the songs they sang….

Following this was a part of the evening which I least expected and most enjoyed – a visit to the centre’s resident geyser*, Pōhutu. It was preceded by a session around a firepit where Māori cuisine was discussed as a prelude to the “Māori feast” we would have later, and then we all trooped down into the Te Whakarewarewa geothermal area in the centre to hope that Pōhutu would do its stuff before we had to troop back and eat.

It took a while – some twenty minutes of gradual buildup – but it was pretty spectacular when it finally came to the party.

The meal was set out as a buffet, and quite a massive one at that. Jane and I had been allocated Table 12, and were both pretty glad to find that it was a table for two. We partook reasonably lightly of the buffet, unlike the couple next to us, who came from (I think) Finland and could reasonably be described as comfortably upholstered.  She had a dessert between two visits to the main course buffet stations, and he had just started on his third main course plateful – the third being after a dessert – as we left. A short bus ride took us back to the hotel, and that was it for the day, and a very enjoyable one it was, too, loaded as it was with many things geothermal of which we don’t see much in the UK.

I said that the Haka was New Zealand’s most famous cultural export, but there is, of course, an even more iconic, erm, icon of the country. This is what we shall learn about tomorrow. See you then?

 

 

*  Pronounced “guyzer”,by the way. A “geezer” is who was taking photos of it.

On To Hobbiton

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Sunday 15 February 2026 – Our eventual destination for the day was Rotorua, well-known for being smelly and overrun by seas of boiling mud. On my previous trip to New Zealand, way back in 1988, the boiling mud thing was just about all I knew about Rotorua (and, let’s face it, the whole of the North Island, being, as I was, vastly ignorant about almost everything back then), so I found some boiling mud and judged the expedition a success before heading back to Auckland. This time we’d be staying in Rotorua for a couple of days so were fairly sure that another dose of boiling mud would be easy to find. En route, though, we had an appointment with a place which I had more than a nagging suspicion was going to be naff but which Jane absolutely insisted be on our schedule – the Hobbiton Movie Set, near Matamata. Jane is well versed in all things Hobbit-y and Middle Earth-y, having read and, as far as I can tell, memorised JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

We had a booked entry time of 10.40, and John (of Kiwi Dundee) had warned us that we’d better make sure we were on time, as he said the place is pretty fully booked most of the time. Given that we had a three-hour journey, that dictated a brisk start to the day, so an 0600 alarm reminded us that we were travelling, not having a holiday, OK? The journey was uneventful, leading us past some more great scenery on the bottom end of the Coromandel Peninsula

before entering the large plain that lies to the south of the peninsula, which is really very flat indeed.

Being flat, it lends itself to dairy farming, and we saw huge numbers of cattle grazing on fields beside the road as we went. The Hobbiton Movie Set is clearly a Big Deal, as signposts to it start some way out. As one gets closer, the wording on the signs is, I think, a bit enigmatic.

Do they farm tourists on the movie set? Breed them and then set them free to roam the world on vast great cruise liners so that snobs can tut about tourism ruining all the nice places?

We arrived in good time, and were actually offered an entry time ten minutes earlier than our booking, which we accepted. I’m glad we did because it meant we ended up with a guide around the site who did an excellent job.

The Hobbiton Movie Set is not like the Harry Potter site near Watford in the UK. There, one can wander at will; on the Hobbiton set, one is shepherded from place to place as a group, with a guide giving talks at various places around the set; one is strongly discouraged from independent wandering. This goes against the grain for me, but actually, since groups arrive with guides every ten minutes, there really is value in going round with the group. as the information dispensed is very interesting.

The group is shepherded on to a bus to take people from the entry and car parks to the set.

There is a welcome video shown on the bus to give some context to what’s going on, and it’s at this point that one begins to get an insight into the scale of the operation. A bit of history:

The set was originally built in the 1990s for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. It is located within a large farm, owned by one Ian Alexander, and was found by a location searcher on a flight over it; it has many of the right characteristics – undulating hills, a lake and so forth – for creating Hobbiton in The Shire for the relatively small amount of time that it would figure in the original trilogy. It was built according to typical movie set rules, i.e. largely faked. The filming was done in about three months and the set broken down and returned to farmland. The story gets more interesting when Peter Jackson, the producer of the Rings films, decided to make a trilogy of films based on Tolkien’s prequel, The Hobbit, some twenty years later. He returned to the Alexanders and between them they decided to make something that was a film set first and foremost, but particularly could then be used as a visitor attraction. A lot more care was put into building the Hobbit holes and associated buildings and the whole thing was put together with a great deal of attention to detail and longevity.

The Hobbiton Movie Set, then, is a 125-acre plot within a 12,50 acre farm – so about 1% of the total area. Small as that percentage is, it still makes the Hobbiton set the largest movie set in the world. It’s clear, from the entry and coach ride over, that there is a vast amount of sheep farming going on.

and one gets the very first glimpse of the set on the bus ride over.

We then got the initial briefing from Rob, our guide (amazingly enough, originally from Guildford, a few miles from where we live in the UK – and he had lived in Knaphill which is the next village to Chobham! Small world…).

He gave us some preliminary information and made it clear that we were expected to stay with the group. Most people in the group had seen the Rings films and quite a few had seen the Hobbit trilogy; but apparently some 40% of visitors have not seen the films – but still they come.

There’s the formal entry point, with its inevitable focus for group photos

and then we got our first view over the film set.

Rob then led us on a route around the place, stopping to give us lots of background information about the creation of the set, and some of the things they had to get up to to make it look lifelike, such as false perspectives to underline the difference in size between four-foot high hobbits and 7-foot high wizards. To be a hobbit extra in the film one only had to be no more than of 5′ 6″ tall and have curly hair; apparently a lot of local farmers suited these criteria.

The tour round offers a view of more hobbit holes than one can shake a stick at; some are built to different scales to aid the false perspective mentioned above

and the main one was, of course, Bag End, where Bilbo Baggins lived, at the highest point of the set.

One could see that a lot of care and attention had been paid to detail and, where possible, to what Tolkien’s vision was for the village to add verisimilitude to the scenes,

even to the extent of ensuring that nasturtiums were growing outside Bag End, as described in the books.

A lot of thought had been put into planting a variety of flower species, some from middle England, where Tolkien lived, and some natives from New Zealand to give the place a sense of being otherworldly. Where clothes hung on lines, these had been put up and taken down every day so that paths were worn through the grass to make it look realistic.

The huge tree above Bag End was the subject of another interesting story from Rob.

It’s an oak tree. For the Rings films, a real, live oak tree was chopped down and erected there,. which in itself must have been a huge endeavour.  But it was propped up there without roots, and so by the time of the Hobbit films it was dead. So it was replaced by an entirely artificial tree – scaffolding poles and other materials make up the trunk and branches. At first, it had 370,000 artificial silk leaves attached to the branches. This was fine up to the point where there was a hiatus in the filming through Peter Jackson’s illness.  When they resumed, sunshine had discoloured the leaves. How to deal with this? Employ four art students, who hand-painted each leaf a different colour each side! The leaves we see today are different – there are only 200,000 of them and they are made out of some kind of polymer. But what an astonishing approach to take to getting verisimilitude.

Another staggering example was how they got Ian Holm (the original older Bilbo Baggins in the Rings films) into the films, as he couldn’t travel to New Zealand. So a replica set for the inside of Bag End that had been created in Wellington was transported over to Pinewood Studios in the UK in its entirety for the filming and then transported all the way back to Wellington.  Now that all filming is finished, it is apparently in Peter Jackson’s home as a guest suite.

Most of the hobbit holes (including Bag End on the site) consisted of frontage only, but two had been set up with complete interiors so that visitors could actually walk through and see what a “real” hobbit hole looked like inside. Jane went through one

and I went through the other.

Standing at the highest point of the set, outside Bag End, one could get a sense of just how the set fits into the vast surrounding farmland;

and could also get a view of the lake, with the mill and the Green Dragon pub,

and that was the last destination on the tour,

where Rob served his group with free drinks

in the pubs beautifully set-up interior.

Outside, beside the bridge

the mill had a moving water wheel

and one could sit outside and look back over the movie set towards Bag End.

We were then bussed back to the entry point where it only took us about a quarter of an hour to find the car among the car parks.  It really is quite an operation: every ten minutes a tour group of 40 guests goes round the set – that must be over 2,000 people a day, and it’s busy every day. My low expectations turned out to be wrong. OK, I still found it endlessly enraging that people consider a scene to be acceptable only if it includes them in it, which makes my photographer soul die a little every time I see it; but I found the whole thing really interesting, and quite heartwarming to see the care and attention that had been paid to making it as good an experience for as many people as possible.

We completed our journey to Rotorua past more great views and a sense of some incoming weather.

At one point we drove through a torrential rain storm, which, it seemed, followed us into Rotorua – we watched the rain lashing down as we settled in to our accommodation.  Our hotel was the Millennium Hotel, which seems very posh. Mind you, our room wasn’t ready when we got there, despite it being after official check-in time (but they gave us free coffee whilst we waited) and there’s a rather complicated relationship between the fridge in our room and the cabinet into which it just fails to fit. But there is a kettle, and a hot tub outside on a little deck for Jane, and seems very comfortable.

We have a couple of full days in Rotorua and a few Things To Get Up To. Stay tuned, and you’ll find out all about it!