The Hobbiton set near Matamata was left standing after the films. The round doors set into the hillside, the vegetable plots tended, the Green Dragon pouring a real ale at the end. It's unashamedly a film set and somehow still charming, the Shire made literal on a working sheep farm. Waitomo's glow-worm caves the same day are the other-worldly counterpoint.

You drift in a small boat through the Waitomo caves in total dark, and the ceiling above is a galaxy. Thousands of glow-worms, their threads of light reflected in the still water. No photos allowed and none would work. It is the quietest, strangest fifteen minutes of the trip.

The floatplane lifts off the lake at Rotorua and banks over the crater lakes, the geothermal country steaming below. Bush-green and sulphur-yellow and the deep blue of the cold lakes. It lands you on the water of a hidden one for a few minutes of total silence. Then back over the steam to town.

Milford in the rain is Milford at its best. The cliffs running with hundreds of temporary waterfalls that vanish when the sun comes out. The cruise noses the bow under Stirling Falls until everyone's drenched and laughing. The road in, through the Homer Tunnel and down the Cleddau valley, is the South Island showing off.