An odd way to spend Christmas Eve, but we left Rotorua early and breakfasted at Taupo, a lively lakeside town where the contrast between the warm weather and the Christmas decorations really hit us, as people sat at 10am drinking local wines. (Insert above Cambridge – an unrelentingly horsey town, with a low-rise main street right off the Wild West set.) From Taupo we struck off east to Napier. Although this added a hundred clicks to the day’s total, I wanted to see the Art Deco town. Following an earthquake in 1930 the town was rebuilt into a confection of contemporary design, with pastel zigzags, chrome lightning strikes, and an eclectic but harmonious integration of Maori, Mayan, Greek, Egyptian and Spanish Mission styles and motifs. They even got a little Celtic in there, and a shamrock. Much of the original stained glass and lightning remains, along with veneered doors and marble walls. Well worth the detour. The drive to Wellington was consequently long, the roads being narrow, winding and, apparently, busy, though to us, more like a Sunday in Cumbria in the 1950s. When you consider that NZ, with its population of under four million, makes it slightly bigger than Wales and roughly seven times the population of Warwickshire. (Ed - check multipliers.) This means – no parking problems, no traffic jams and everyone knows everyone else. We arrived at Ewen & Gail’s at 6pm where we were made extremely welcome in their lovely home with stunning views of Paremata Marina and the distant South Island. We ate, drank and made merry before keeling over in a haze of reminiscence and laughter, full of praise for the glorious scenery, friendly people and civilised discoveries. We refrained from observing how struck we were by the strong resemblance between much of the country we’d seen and scenes from the Shire and Hobbiton. The neatly cropped rolling hills like a rumpled duvet, the tidy hedgerows and orderly farmsteads, like an elaborate chessboard, and the unruly topography, where mountains, screes, crags, cliffs and bluffs tumble over each other in breathtaking chaos. We mentioned none of this, suspecting that there will be much more of this Tolkein-esque scenery before very long.