Visiting the Shire was something I always ALWAYS wanted to do, and given that this was my first Lord of the Rings location visit in New Zealand, as you’d expect, I was incredibly excited. (Well, I’m excited at any LotR location visit, but yeah you get the drift..) Lots of squealing and happy grins that garnered a couple of raised eyebrows [...]

One of the first things we heard when we told people we were heading down to Rotorua was, beware of the smell. Also known as Sulphur City, the place generally has the smell of rotten eggs. At least, that’s what we were told. In truth, it really wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. Yeah you could [...]

My first day in New Zealand was the first time I’d heard of this thing called a hangi, which is the traditional Maori way of cooking food. And how this Kiwi dancer, Ben, explained it to me was that it was a big barbecue on the ground. So the next day we were talking about hangis and another dancer, a part Maori [...]