New Zealand thermals, hot beaches and hobbits

Champagne Pools at Wai-o-tapu

You are a traveller. You are sat in an outdoor theatre, bowl-shaped and curving round a small white slab of rock. There is a woman emptying a sack of soap into a hole in the top. Your companions are beside you. The bearded one is desperately taking pictures, afraid to miss the crucial moment. The curly-haired one is leaning backwards, worried that the Lady Knox Geyser at Wai-o-tapu Thermal Wonderland will spray boiling water on the audience. It doesn't. It erupts, sending a white jet of water and steam straight up into the air.

Lady Knox Geyser at Wai-o-tapu Thermal Wonderland

You continue your journey around Wai-o-tapu and visit the Champagne Pool, named for its bubbling surface. It is a 62m well that’s filled with water, grazing the earth's burning crust and drawing heat up. The water steams at 72°C. There is also Echo Lake, a lake dyed green by algae which grows in its warm waters. You walk around mud pools boiling over, plopping out hot sulphurous gas. The whole place smells like deviled eggs.

"I kinda fancy some eggs now," the bearded one says, sniffing the air.

Mud pools at Wai-o-tapu

Next you travel to a campsite called Brock's Place, a scenic farm plot overlooking rolling green hills near Matamata. It is a five-minute drive from Hobbiton, the film set of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

You and your companions head out early the next morning to Hobbiton. The tour bus takes you on a short ride from the visitor's centre into the Alexander Farm. As the bus curls around sheep speckled hills your companions begin humming the soundtrack to 'The Shire'.

View from Brock's Place

"About 75% of people have no idea what I'm talking about," says the tour guide as you walk through Gandalf's Pass and into the Hobbiton set. She tells you that many people who take the tour have never watched any of the films or read any of the books.

Over two hours you learn about the rigours that set-designers endured to satisfy Peter Jackson's taste. There are some painstakingly created plumb trees that appear only in the extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring, for a couple of seconds. There's an entire section of the set designed for a short flyover in The Hobbit, it features for just five seconds. The grand tree that sits on top of Bag End was once real, but the leaves had to be hand-painted to Jackson's specified colour. For the Hobbit films, the tree had to be recreated with thousands of plastic leaves to resemble a younger version.

It sounds like a lot of effort, but the result is impressive. They've created a lifelike world apart, where you wouldn't be too shocked to see a creature from Middle Earth emerge in the cold light of reality. After you've sampled a beer (or perhaps a cider, or a juice) from The Green Dragon, you head back to the real world.

Fine ale from the South Farthing

There is a bit of the timeline that I'll gloss over. It involves a leisurely stay at Lake Maraetai where your companions rented kayaks and rowed with heavy breathing along the shoreline. Just before leaving, a kindly old couple came up to you to suss out whether they could use your camping spot. They made a recommendation: Mt Maunganui. They said it was the best beach in New Zealand.

Lake Maraetai

"If you haven't seen Mt Maunganui, you haven't seen New Zealand," the woman said.

You should have taken this as a warning, reader, because most people who say: "if you haven't seen x, you haven't seen the greater part of x," have a very limited sense of adventure. This is where you are now, Mt Maunganui, and it sucks.

The beach is nice enough, but it's long and straight and bare, a never-ending road of sticky yellow sand that will get into your clothes and inside every joint and crevice of your body. The campsites here are expensive and overbooked. You end up staying at a tacky place with a swimming pool teeming with teenage schoolchildren on a volleyball tour. They are all annoying. $60NZ for a camping spot and all your companions do is to watch Lord of the Rings inside the van.

The next day you head up to Coromandel. This is a beautiful beachy bit of New Zealand that juts out to the east of Auckland. You check-in at Riverglen Campsite and head out to Hot Sand Beach. This beach sits on shallow thermal hotbeds. The volcanic activity in the area means that sections get very, very hot underfoot. The theory is that you can dig a hole at low tide and fill it with water that is naturally heated. Your companions are not very good at this. Spade in hand, they walk around the hordes of tourists (some are already haughtily camped out in their sand holes) and aimlessly dig at the slightest sign of heat.

At Hot Sand Beach

Eventually they find hot sand (near the other tourists, unsurprisingly). The only issue is that the warm sand stretches into the sea - no jacuzzi style hole is possible. Still, the effect is amazing. You dig your toes into the sand beneath the water time and again, pulling your feet out suddenly when the heat becomes too much, shocked and delighted by the idea that the earth's molten core has tickled your soles.

Cathedral Cove

The next day you travel out to Cathedral Cove. This, reader, is the best beach in New Zealand for a relaxing swim and beautiful views. You walk through a cove to the other side of the beach and spend time reading, sunbathing, swimming and people-watching. To your mirthful amusement, both your companions drench their walking boots by trying to walk through the cove at high tide. They slosh along behind you to the car, grumbling and moaning to themselves. It's a wonderful day.

Monolith at Cathedral Cove