A pleasant ride on the bus is bringing us to Hamilton, few km south of Auckland. Hamilton is a relatively small university town grown along the river, and it turned out to be a very charming place to stay for a couple of days.
The city center is full of dining places and out for the evening meal we caught a good deal for roasted lamb: buy 2 pay 1. We figured it was so cheap we couldn’t miss it, but we got carried away by the wine list and the dessert menu and the dessert wines and so and so forth…ended up spending about three times more than we should have. But it was all excellent! After investigating our possibilities for a day excursion we find that the Hobbiton movie set is close enough for a visit.

Even out of season there are people from all over visiting The Shire which has now been renovated for the shooting of The Hobbit. All is in place, the service is great and it’s clear that they are trying to get as much as possible out of the movies in the years when the interest is very high!

The weather is really great down here in Hamilton and the riverside walk is a great option to reach the botanical garden just outside the city. The Autumn here looks like a late summer, the temperature is perfect and all the powerful colors of the leaves makes the view really spectaular. We are definitely enjoying these warm days now since from the news it looks like in the south island is snowing and it’s chilly, so the winter is not late down there!

Not far from Hamilton is our next stop towards Wellington: Rotorua. The region is famous for its geothermal activities, spas and the lake. We decide to book online while on the bus and get a room on the main street…that sounded nice until we figured that the main street was as long as 3.5Km and our hotel was indeed 3.4Km from town! Could it be: so far so good?

One more shiny and warm morning for us to walk to town and along the lake. Most of it really looks like a normal lake, but the edge towards the geysers is full of sulfur and looks white and dense! The walk brings us to the new museum of Rotorua. This has a quite impressive story, the building was originally a spa, but when it was built the corrosive power of the water and gasses had not been properly considered, so the whole structure started falling apart even before opening! Now it was been restored and it hosts a really great museum of the history and culture of the Maori people. We join a guided tour with a Finnish lady who moved to New Zealand more than 40 years ago!