Mikhail’s All-Star World Tour 2006

After all that hectic sight-seeing for the past couple of days, and finishing the scenic drive this morning, we decided to take it slow in the town of Rotorua. The locals call it “Roto-Vegas” because it’s an ultra-commercial tourist trap, and I guess we fell for it. Really, it has little in common with Vegas, just a bunch of tourist shops like Pier 49 or Pike Place Market. No gambling, prostitution, or nightlife anywhere I could see - the town was practically closed down at 7pm on Sunday.

What Rotorua does have is underground thermal activity, geysers and boiling mud pits that release copious volumes of sulfur into the atmosphere, the consequent ever-present smell, and a Polynesian Spa where we spent Sunday afternoon moving from one hot tub to another. I finally got some sun (looking less like a Seattlite every day), and a bit of reading time.

Today we slept in Tauranga and now we’re off to Auckland, to the airport for our Sydney flight….

Yesterday was another sunny late-summer day; we drove down to a scenic loop that goes around the plains. The scenery is incredible, and it changes every hour as you drive, one landscape after another: first rolling green hills with groves of trees, then a deep evergreen forest, then the pines give way to tall oaks, then you’re on curvy mountain roads, then you reach a plateu of wild grass with exotic sword-leaf bushes, then green hills again - this time covered with sunlit sheep. And in the background: Mount Doom. Definitely the best drive I’ve been on.

Flew into New Zealand yesterday morning at 7am, picked up our car and drove down to Matamata, where the Hobbiton scenes from Lord of the Rings were filmed. Driving around New Zealand is unreal - crazy trees, green rolling hills, really high speed limits (what’s a “kilometer” anyway) and traffic-safety propaganda billboards everywhere. “Lose your confidence, save your life”, “Locals crash too”, etc. Driving on the wrong side is easy (once the jet lag wore off), sitting in the passenger side with a steering wheel is a bit trickier.

Matamata is a tiny town (~10K people), and the LOTR tour is their biggest draw. I usually detest tourist attractions, but this one is straight up my alley - I’ve read those books countless times in Russian & English, I liked the movies, and now I actually got to walk around the Shire, crawl into a hobbit-hole, stand on the road where Gandalf rode in with his fireworks wagon. Totally made me feel like a kid inside my favorite cartoon. Too bad $2 NZD only buys me 15 min of internet in this old-school arcade-style machine, or I’d try to post pictures too.

I’m writing this from a hostel in Taupo (resort town on a mountain lake) where we stayed. Off to more adventures…