The Fat Duck: a completely unbiased review (not).

What can I say that hasn't been said before about Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant?  That my bucket list only had one item and it was crossed off today?  That I’m such a big fan of Heston I've got his number on the back of my duffle coat?  That it was even better than all three of his books led me to dare imagine?

First, the back story.  Like 90,000 other people I entered my name in the ballot last October.  And, like so many of those that weren't computer generated by some total arseholes in the finance industry with no respect for the rules that enable civilisation, my entry was not successful.  Nobody we knew got offered a place. 

Fast forward to Easter Sunday 2015, where I was rostered for dessert at my family’s lunch.   We had not long finished eating the brûléed lemon tart I’d made out of Heston At Home, which everyone loved, when my phone rang.  It was The Fat Duck restaurant, advising that they’d had a cancellation for Wednesday’s lunch sitting and was I interested.  Hmmm, let me think about that it’s a Mastercard and the number is…

68 hours turned out to be the perfect notice period; enough time to recover from the shock and get excited, without having to wait too long for it to all happen.  Our dining companions, Anne and Paul, had been part of our syndicate from the outset.  We each entered the ballot, with the promise that anyone whose golden ticket came up would take the other three.  Fortunately all of us had very understanding employers and we found a babysitter willing to listen to Eleanor complaining all day that we didn't take her with us. 

Following the obligatory photos out the front, we walked into the start of a mesmerising sensory experience.  A long dark hallway led up to a dead end, until a door magically opened and we were welcomed into a dark wood paneled room that was flooded with natural light and simultaneously larger and smaller than my previous nights’ dreams.

The staff were all, without a single exception, wonderful.  Friendly but not intrusive, knowledgeable about all of the dishes, excited to watch our reactions to the magic as though it wasn't something they’d been doing six days a week for the last two months.  We were never once asked if everything was OK, because they knew it was all perfect.  At least twice, someone picked up an empty plate from our table, and while politely listening to our babbling fandom handed it silently - and without even making eye contact - to a random passing colleague who took it without question as though it's something they practise.  Maybe it is. 

And the food.  Oh the food.  All seventeen courses of it.  As mentioned, I've got all the Heston books and have studied in detail many of the recipes we were served.  I was expecting amazing textures that can’t be recreated without whipping siphons, sous vide techniques and nitro.  Everyone knows about the conch shells hiding iPods that play sounds of the beach to evoke memories and intensify the emotional experience.  I've made Heston’s bacon ice cream and suffered the brain-twisting incomprehension of something that looks like ice cream on the plate, and feels like ice cream on the tongue, but is savoury and therefore just wrong.  It’s all about science and psychology in the pursuit of excellence.  On paper it sounds almost cold and soulless. 

What I hadn't expected was the flavours; the way a single mouthful could contain so many different things that each stood out individually.  The Waldorf salad lollipop where the apple, walnut and celery elements were each completely distinct, the way they would be with a real salad.  In what universe could a tiny grilled onion-half be my favourite element on a plate that included pork belly?  Snail porridge?  Please sir, I want some more.  We all ate our lamb jelly with spoons, then later went back to drain the glass it was served in and found the mint aspect was more pronounced once the jelly was room temperature and liquid: two for one in the same meal!  The bread was, quite simply, the best bread any of us had ever eaten (or tried not to fill up on).  And yes, a Toast Sandwich is two pieces of bread with a slice of toast in the middle.  What else could it possibly be? 

I simply can’t pick a favourite dish: I can, however, pick a least favourite.  “Sound of the sea” achieved its mission admirably, because it completely evoked the sounds, smells and tastes of the ocean.  Trouble is, I hate the beach.  At least that course gave my face a break from smiling like an idiot. 

We chose one of the matched wine packages for the relatively bargain price of $200 per person.  Money. Well. Spent.  All of the wines we had were Australian (except the sake, of course) and they were amazing.  I just can’t image what the $450 per person wines must be like, let alone the $1,150 per person package.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Bevan was delighted by a tea menu that was notably longer than the coffee options, and I was delighted to hear our waiter admit that they knew they’d have to improve their coffee game when they moved to Melbourne. 

With a 1:30pm allocated reservation time, we were the last table to arrive and the last to leave.  We watched the sun set over the Yarra and had the Crown Casino fireballs outside our windows at 6pm with a few dishes yet to go.  Each of the courses was small enough that, despite their quantity, the total volume of food wasn't stomach-bursting.  I probably could have gone a kebab on the way home actually, except that now I can never eat again because I have tasted perfection.  

Thermomix body scrub

This is just amazing.  Not only is it a great hand and body scrub but it smells fantastic (and, shhhhh, tastes pretty good, too).  The almond and sugar scrub off dead skin, the oats are soothing and the coconut oil moisturises, all in one step.  The best part is knowing exactly what's in it.

Ingredients

• 70g almonds whole
• 20g raw oats
• 300g raw sugar
• 100g coconut oil

Pulse the almonds using the turbo button until they're nicely ground up.  That's entirely a matter of personal preference; you don't want it so finely ground that it turns into almond butter, but you do want it fairly well chopped up.  Add the oats and pulse a few more times, then add the other ingredients and pulse again to mix.

To use, scoop some out then add a few drops of water to loosen the mix.  Scrub, rinse and marvel.

The Thermomix minor thesis

Below is the content of an email I sent to people I know who own (or are thinking of getting) a Thermomix.  And as soon as I hit send a dozen other things occurred to me that should have been included.  So, here's the original email and I'll keep adding to it through new blog posts.

Recipes you just have to try

· Magic bean chocolate cake.  This is your go-to for gluten-free pleasure or when you need a gluten-free cake that you don't want to tell people is gluten-free because of all the preconceptions that would trigger.  The main ingredient is a tin of red kidney beans, but you'd never guess that by how light and fluffy this cake is.  This is not like any of the potato or beetroot chocolate cakes where you can clearly taste the vegetable; it really does just taste like chocolate cake made with regular flour.

· Isi's easy Portuguese rolls.  Making bread in the TMX is simple, and these are a great example.  My suggestion for anything you make with yeast is to use the TMX to heat the liquid up to 37 degrees, which is the perfect temperature to activate the yeast and means the bowl is already warm to provide a good proving environment.  These have that gorgeous crunchy outside and fluffy perfect inside, and you can slightly taste the honey in the crust.  Just be sure to use flour that is around 14% protein: Coles stock a brand called Lighthouse, which does a specialty bread / pizza flour that's perfect (and you'll probably see a picture of a TMX on the box because they're both Perth companies helping cross-promote each other).  Also you can just use one 7g sachet of dried yeast instead of trying to hunt down the fresh stuff and the result is the same.  Oh, and knead you have the speed dial on the closed lid position first, then hit the kneading button (the one with the wheat on it).

· Italian meatballs and spaghetti.  This will show you the power of the varoma.  The spaghetti cooks in the sauce, which is itself steaming the meatballs.  And before you freak out at the idea of steamed meatballs, once they're covered in the sauce you can't even tell that they haven't been browned in oil.  Oh, and you don't have a frying pan to clean up after browning, so that's a winner right there.  

· Golden syrup dumplings: another one to get you using your varoma.  I love the instruction to NOT wash the bowl out between steps (there's an anti-washing-up theme developing here).

· Sixty minute eggs: simplest recipe ever: put some eggs in their shells in the basket, cover in water, cook at 60 degrees for 60 minutes.  The egg will poach perfectly in the shell, with the white having a lovely creamy texture, not at all rubbery, and the yolk will be still soft and liquid but not runny.  To get the eggs out, crack the bottom as if to open a boiled egg then let it sort of plop out onto your toast.  Yes it's worth the wait, and they're perfect for dipping toast soldiers because you can dip all of the egg, not just the yolk.

· Lemon cleaning concentrate: this smells amazing, and is perfect for wiping out things like your oven and fridge where you don't necessarily want to use chemicals.  For the oven you'll need to add a bit of elbow grease, but you know that you won't gas yourself using it and you won't be baking anything toxic into your next dish if you miss wiping a bit out.  It's brilliant for cleaning out your TMX bowl with some hot water and a whizz on speed 10.  I also throw a splodge of it (few tablespoons) in if I'm doing a load of tea towels, dishcloths and other things that could benefit from a bit of lemon fresh vinegar light-bleaching action.

There's also some really great recipes in the book that comes with your TMX.  Highlights for us have been:

· Mashed potato is just a revelation. If you haven't tried this yet I order you to do so within the next week.  Not only is the texture incredible, but because you're not boiling all the nutrients out into water you throw away it's healthy (even if you add as much butter and cheese as they suggest).

· Polenta, partly because it comes out more smooth and perfect than you could ever achieve by hand on the stove-top, partly because there are no second degree burns from it spattering up while you stir and partly because the jug is much easier to wash than a stove-top pot if you haven't spent the entire 30 minutes stirring non-stop and it's stuck.  I find the speed needs to be a bit higher than the book suggests: if you can't see the top of the polenta moving then turn the speed up a bit).  The full recipe makes absolutely heaps, so have a lamington tray lined with baking paper ready to go and pour what you don't eat on the night into that so you can serve it again later as polenta chips.

· Porridge: perfect in winter because it cooks itself while you're in the shower.  The official recipe in the book has been updated but I can't find the link (lucky I wrote in my copy).  Now it's simply 160g of rolled oats, 860g of liquid (we do half milk, half water), salt to taste then 11 minutes at 90 degrees on reverse speed 2.  You don't need to blitz the oats either, especially if you like a bit of texture.  Or, if 'texture' isn't your thing you can cook it for more like 20 minutes like Bevan does.

· Buttermilk scones are as fluffy as promised but they're also as sticky as it warns.  Worth the mess for the end result.

· Vegetable stock.  Don't freak out about the amount of salt in this.  By the time you dilute it into whatever you're making it's not much per serving.  Seriously, trust the recipe on this one.  You'll find lots of recipes in the Thermomix world use this as well so it's definitely worth making so you've got it on hand.

· Jam.  Too easy.  Sterilize your jars and fill them while they're still hot by pouring straight from the TMX bowl using the handle.  No mess at all, no second degree burns.  Just be very sure it's at setting point before you bottle it: you may need to give it a go at varoma temperature for a few minutes to get there.

Recipes not to try

· Our gift with purchase was the vegetarian book.  The vegan leek quiche on page 71 has no butter in the pastry and neither eggs nor cream in the filling.  How they dare to call it a quiche is beyond me.  It is unspeakably grim.  Bevan refused to finish his serving and the rest went in the bin because we couldn't bear to inflict it even on our dogs.

Websites to check out

· http://www.recipecommunity.com.au/ is the official Thermomix Australia forum.  The website seems to be a clone of the German one, and it's horrible to navigate (anyone who uses SAP will recognise the same Teutonic utter disdain for the user experience).  Also many of the recipes are submitted by users and have zero testing or quality control, so you're kind of on your own a bit.  However, the search function is pretty straight froward and the recipes do at least have a rating system to give you an idea of which are the ones with mass appeal.

· http://www.forumthermomix.com/index.php is another user-based forum, and again the only 'guarantee' of the recipes is the number of positive comments.  They also do reviews of recipe books so you can get an idea what people think of the recipes in it and what tweaks they've made that you can copy.  All the recipes are nicely sorted into categories, but it's a bit hit and miss what you find from there digging through the threads.

· http://tenina.com/ Tenina was one of the first official Thermomix recipe developers in Australia and her writing style is fantastic.  I've got her book "For Food's Sake" and it's full of drool-worthy recipes, but she also publishes a lot of them here and on her blog for free.

· Assorted bloggers, each with their own spin, including:

o    Steph Berg, just for the sheer number of recipes

o    Thermovixens, because the name is cool and they just seem to have so much fun

o    Thermomixer; he's a hard-core foodie so the recipes are a bit more 'serious'

o    Quirky cooking has a focus on really healthy, natural recipes with lots of gluten-, refined sugar- and additive-free options.  She lives in far north Queensland and home schools her four kids, so that gives you a grossly over-generalised idea of the sightly hippy vibe to this site.

Recipe books

· You probably don't need any other recipe books because the forums and the blogs and adding the words "thermomix" and "recipe" to a Google search will give you more free resources than you'll ever need.  There's also such a wide variety of recipes in the main book that you'll be able to quickly figure out how to convert all your favourite recipes to TMX versions (for example, I check the shortcrust pastry recipe to know what speed and for roughly how long to rub butter into flour even if I'm using a different pastry recipe.  The answer is 8 seconds, which sounds absurd but is true.)  However, you get what you pay for from free recipes, especially untested ones other people put up  such as this one where I pointed out that half the instructions are missing and the author responded with no acknowledgement of the problem (but it's an excellent recipe and another one I'd suggest you try).  So, there are are a couple of books out there that I can recommend:

· Tenina Holder's For Food's Sake, if just for the caramelised garlic paste recipe and her fabulous writing style (this was my bedside reading for a few nights).  It's currently sold out but get it once you can, and add some of her Crio Bru to your order at the same time because you need it for a lot of the recipes so you may as well save on postage.

· Dani Valent's In The Mix.  This is TMX throws a posh dinner party, and it won't be for everyone.  There are some good mid-week recipes, but a lot of them are very involved: not necessarily difficult, just lots of steps with lots of ingredients.  My copy is from the first print run.  Yay it's a first edition, but boo it suffers from a few quirks.  Mum and I went to one of her cooking classes recently and were given a number of tweaks, such as reducing the parsley oil from 15 minutes at speed 10 to only 8 minutes and doubling the soy and oyster sauce quantities in the beef stir fry.  A reprint has just been released and hopefully a few of those things have been corrected.

· The various Thermomix recipe books.  We've got the vegetarian one mentioned above for the infamous vegan leek "quiche", which does have a few other good things in there.  The Indian book is brilliant because it translates corriander/cilantro, zucchini/courgette, eggplant/aubergine, lots of the spices and gives really great alternative ingredients if you can't get certain things.  There's also a gluten free one, an Asian one, a seafood one and assorted other 'healthy' ones including some non-Thermomix branded ones about cooking without additives.  

Gadgets to seriously consider

· The spatula that comes with the TMX is clever at things like lifting out the steamer basket and scraping down the top of the bowl while the blades are running (don't put a regular one in while the blades are spinning: it will cut a chunk off.  Here speaks the voice of experience), but it's not all that great at scraping.  Tenina sells one that you can't use while the blades are going, but it's really good at cleaning out the bowl. Order at least two, because they strongly resemble a pirate cutlass and are likely to be carried off by little people with eye patches.  Also check your local homeswares store for silicone spatulas, especially one from the Soho sub-brand of S&P where the end you use is square on one side and rounded on the other.  It's exactly the right shape for getting around the blade.

· If you're going to do a lot of spice cooking, consider getting a second seal for the inside of your lid.  The seal is the one thing that seems to retain smells a bit so a second one will help you feel less worried about the potential impact on your sweet recipes.   

Other tips

· The inbuilt scales are good, but I get a bit nervous using them because if I put in too much it's not always easy to get out again, especially if it's not the first ingredient going into the bowl.  Luckily the scales work just as well if you sit a bowl on top of the lid, zero out the scales, weigh the item into the bowl and then tip in.

· The steaming basket fits on top of the lid, so if you're cooking something that has the measuring cup out but is spitting everywhere you can sit the basket on top as a splash guard.

· If you want shredded chicken for a salad (or to shred the ham for a pea and ham soup) you can cut breast fillets up into about 5cm squares, steam them until cooked and then shred them in four seconds, reverse speed 5.  Absolutely perfect shredding.  How long would it take to do that by hand?

· If you're making yoghurt, when you get to the part about letting the milk cool down make sure you wait until the 37 degree light goes out.  If it's on, the temperature is somewhere between 37 and 49, and the upper end of that range will kill your starter culture.  It doesn't matter if it drops below that temperature because it's so easy to get it back up to there again.

· Don't be afraid of your varoma.  Make some of the recipes in the book that use it and just follow the numbers in the recipe.  It's easy, healthy and amazing how much food your TMX can cook at once.

· If you really want to personalise your Thermomix because you love it so much you want it to be as special as you know it is, there's a website just for you.  Hopefully there's also a self help group.  

Finding out the rest of this is half the fun, so my minor thesis ends here.  Just hope you enjoy using a Thermomix as much as I do.

New Zealand; Day 14

Sadly, the final day of our trip and it was a low key one.

We started with a visit out to the Model Boat Dockyard in Onehunga, where Bevan purchased the kit for a scale model of The Endeavour's longboat.  Apparently this is a much, much more appropriate entry point to the hobby than the Endeavour itself that I bought for his birthday.  He was also able to pick up some rather necessary tools, which I had failed to buy for his birthday. 

While Bevan was there, Eleanor and I headed back to a playground we'd spotted, and I got a handy iPhone-based sourced hint from one of the other parents for a yum cha restaurant, Pearl Garden, where we ended up for a fantastic lunch.  It overlooked the fish market, and with the humidity that day it both smelled and felt authentically Chinese.  Since it was right in the heart of where we'd been shopping the previous day we were able to double back to a couple of stores and pick up a few extra toys to keep Eleanor happy on the plane.  And guess who so utterly charmed the toy shop owner that he just gave her a bath toy as an extra freebie?


Our last planned stop before the airport turned out to be very conveniently located right next to it.  Butterfly Creek is a butterfly house slash reptile zoo slash petting farm slash playground slash cafe.  Eleanor was so enraptured with the trampoline that she ignored her last fluffy opportunity.  She got to feed another lamb and take a tractor ride, along with lots of other animals to wave to.  Have you ever wondered about the saying "Happy as a pig in mud"?

The butterfly house was huge and well stocked, which is why it's even more inexplicable that a five year old chose to poke the one butterfly sitting on a hibiscus that I was attempting to photograph.  Bevan congratulated me on my tactical application of the death stare on a child who I couldn't yell at or throttle because the parents, while clearly negligent in their supervisory obligations, would probably have chosen to look up just at that point.  And yes, watch this space in three years from now when somebody else is probably saying the same about Eleanor.

I ignored the spiders, but did admire their display of cockroaches in an absolutely filthy dolls house.  Very nice touch.  They also had a surprisingly large number of young American Alligators.  I'm not sure what they plan on doing with them all once they grow to their full 4.5m adult length, although that's probably quite a few handbags so maybe they've got it figured.  They were in glass enclosures about 1m off the ground, with a step up for the littlies.  Eleanor obviously didn't realise that the place where she was clambering up for a look lined up perfectly with a baby 'gator looking straight out at us, but she got a huge shock when they came eye-to-eye.  Of all the times for me to NOT accidentally hit the movie record button on the camera.  D'oh!

Finally it was time to say goodbye to our "big car" as Eleanor has called it.  We checked in with plenty of time to kill, but the airport has a nostalgically old-fashioned observation deck where we could all relax for a bit.  While there one of the NZ airforce planes was on the tarmac, and another came in to land and taxied around behind it.  I suspect my photo therefore depicts the entire New Zealand air force in a single frame, but I'll refrain from posting it in case that's some sort of terrorist act.

Eleanor got to burn off some more steam in the McDonald's playground (found without the help of any of the airport information staff, all of whom gave conflicting advice about the existence of such a facility), before some last minute shopping - including a Lego kiwi t-shirt for Eleanor - and we were on the plane home.
  

It's been a wonderful trip, and we highly recommend New Zealand as a holiday destination for families.  Next time we travel we'll definitely go the self-contained option, as not buying breakfasts or using laundromats saved precious amounts of money and time.  I'm sorry that we didn't get to see more of the South Island, but that gives us an excuse to go back.

New Zealand; Day 13

Another quiet one today, and perhaps one of being in the right place at slightly the wrong time.  But hey, with all the luck we've had with timing so far on this trip we're not complaining.

We started by heading out to Kelly Tarlton's Antarctic Encounter and Underwater World.  It's an aquarium built in the old Auckland sewage works in the mid-eighties.  Kelly was NZ's best approximation of Jacques Cousteau, and was one of the first to use acrylic tanks to allow visitors an eye-level, underwater view of the exhibits.  Sadly for his family he died only 7 weeks after it opened.  A tiny bit sadly for us, one of the best parts was only part open; there's a conveyor belt that takes you on laps of a massive ocean tank, and half of it was closed, but the open half was fantastic.

They've also got little snowmobile tanks that take you for a lap through the penguin enclosure so you can see them up really close.  The cabins are fully sealed because the enclosure has sub-zero temperatures.  Unfortunately that also sealed in the body odour of the teenager sitting in front of us.  The fishy smell of the aquarium when the door finally opened was an unexpected relief.

Anyway, ten baby penguins hatched yesterday, so we got to see some very Happy Feet bundles of fluff up close.  It was fantastic, and as the place wasn't that busy we went on the penguin lap a second time (thankfully having a cabin to ourselves).

After a bite to eat in the cafe, the location of which Eleanor remembered with GPS accuracy, we saw some crayfish and an octopus being fed and fought our way out through the ubiquitous gift shop.  By this stage Eleanor was announcing that she was tired and wanted to go home to bed, but that all changed when she spotted the playground we stopped at.  The shoes I only bought for her a couple of months back are now too small, so she insisted on taking them off, and it was lovely watching her run around in the bindi-free grass and daisies.

After a stop on Auckland's equivalent of Chapel St to pick up new shoes it was home for a nap, and then off to our 6pm dinner reservation in the Orbit revolving restaurant near the top of the Sky Tower.  As mentioned yesterday, we wanted to be there for the transition from day to night.  Great plan; we just didn't count on the rain coming in and the restaurant being in the middle of the cloud belt.  Theoretically diners can see up to 80km, but the best we managed was an occasional glimpse five or six city blocks into the distance.  Still, the food was great and Eleanor - who showed absolutely no fear at all of walking on the glass panels in the observation deck floor - loved being up high.

New Zealand; Day 12

We've been offline for a few days. The Rotorua motel network went down late on our last night there (apparently it doesn't like the sulphur) and of course Hobbit holes don't have wi-fi, but we're back now and sad to be staring down our final few days.

This morning we did a tour of the Waitomo Caves. They've been running tours here non-stop for 110 years, and frankly some of the jokes the tour guide told are probably that old.  Being a limestone cave it's full of stalactites and stalagmites, although since there hasn't been much rain lately they were much drier than we expected. One large cavern has amazing acoustics, and has hosted concerts by many famous singers including Dame Tiri Te Kanawa (who the guide claims is a Waitomo native but I can't find anything to back that up.  Well, not on Wikipedia anyway.)

It's also where the local Carols by Candlelight are apparently held, although they don't need torches because the caves are full of glowworms.  We'd seen a couple on the river banks in Rotorua, but nothing compared to here.

After walking down lots of stairs we climbed into boats, and the guide used overhead cables to slowly pull us through while our eyes adjusted.  The boats are necessary because most of the glowworms are in the section directly above the river that flows through the caves as that's where their insect food comes from.  It was an amazing experience, and yet again Eleanor took what could have been quite scary completely in her stride.

(That isn't us in the image below, but you can't take photos in there and this at least gives you the general idea. Actually it doesn't at all, because there are no worms on the cave walls and they're not all as bright as that and it's quite obviously been photoshopped, but the boat is a bit like ours at least.)

Next it was only a few hundred metres up the road to a stop I've been looking forward to for weeks; a shed where they do a daily demonstration of shearing enormous Angora rabbits, and sell yarn made of the bunnies' fur.  It was quite freaky seeing how much the rack they tie them to for shearing resembled a spit roast, but the rabbit didn't seem to mind at all.  They are incredibly soft, and I went slightly nuts in the retail bit.

We stopped at the Big Apple (no, not New York, just a really big apple) for lunch, before starting the 3 hour haul up to Auckland, arriving just in time for peak hour.  Once a load of washing was on we headed back out to the Sky Tower to watch the sun set from a long way up.  Well, that was the plan.  The reality was that every street the GPS told us to turn down either wasn't there or was blocked with road works or police or a crane of some other impediment, and that's not including most of them  being one way at the best of times.

The tower entry is in the casino, which apparently includes lots of restaurants.  The only one we could actually find was a massively overpriced buffet, which although not the best food we've ever eaten at least meant we didn't have to wait for an a la carte option to be cooked, and Eleanor was starting to get a bit cranky.  And after all that it was totally dark by the time we'd finished, so we've decided to have another attempt tomorrow night.

Obviously we did eventually get here, but otherwise our attempt to buy nappies on the way home almost ended in a Gilligan's Island-esque tragedy.  The GPS gave us a list of local grocery stores, so we picked a supermarket name we recognised and started following orders.  The aforementioned problems struck again, and at one point the GPS sent us on a full lap around Auckland University and looked like it was going to do the same to us again.  After a few more very strange detours - and hearing Eleanor pipe up with "bugger" from the back seat, much to our bemusement/horror/relief that it wasn't something worse - we finally spotted the welcoming fluorescent glow of our destination, and thankfully it was still open.  To put it in context, a 2.1km trip to the supermarket ended up taking 40 minutes.  And we thought navigating around Wellington was bad...

New Zealand; Day 11

Today was Lord of the Rings Day. We had a quick browse around down town Rotorua before heading off to the Alexander family's farm near MataMata. It was the site chosen by Peter Jackson to build the set for Hobbiton for the movies, and once there you can understand why; it can't be seen from the road, and from the site you can't see power lines, buildings or any other trace of western civilisation.

Our expectation was that all the movie set stuff was removed at the end of filming, and so the tour is simply an expensive way to see some holes dug into the side of hills. However, when we got there we were informed that the site is presently under the control of the movie production company and we had to sign confidentiality waivers. I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to disclose the existence of the waiver itself, but basically if I discuss any of what we saw, or publish any of the photos we were allowed to take for private use only, Peter Jackson will personally set on me not just his lawyers but possibly a few Nazgûl, and frankly I'm not sure which would be scarier. Therefore let me just say that it's public knowledge that pre-production work has commenced on The Hobbit, that we didn't see just holes in the ground like we expected, and OMG OMG OMG OMG did we time our visit right because they're probably not going to be able to run those tours for much longer before they have to stop for a few months.

The farm is still a working sheep property, and so at the end of the tour we got to see a sheep shearing demonstration and to feed two really young lambs, who understand the game by now and came tearing out of their pen towards us all looking for who had the bottles of milk. Everyone else on the tour could see the superb photo opportunity of letting Eleanor do some feeding, but we did share the bottles around, too. She just loved it.

After a second breakfast at the cafe / gift shop it was on the road again.  I've been having a recurring dream about the Crowded House lyrics to Mean To Me, particularly the line about how "the sound of Te Awamutu had a truly sacred ring".  I put it down to all the exposure to Maori place names, but had no idea of Te Awamutu is a real place or not, and if yes, where.  So imagine my delight when we drove through it!


From there it was off to Waitomo and some Hobbit holes that I can show you photos of. Woodlyn Park is a slightly wacky motel with a train carriage, and plane and a boat converted to accommodation. They've also built two Hobbit holes into the side of the hill, and we'd managed to book one of them, which capped off our day perfectly. I'm guessing they're popular, because it looks like a couple more will be built next door to ours. Ooops, am I allowed to say that?

New Zealand; Day 10

Today was one case of perfect timing after another, and more perfect weather.

We were up early ready for Bevan's 10am helicopter safari to White Island. Getting that far had been something of a saga; weeks ago I booked him for 1.30pm today, but there wasn't enough people for the minimum In fact there wasn't anyone else wanting to do it today, so he was booked for 3pm yesterday. Except then the weather was too windy and misty and it was cancelled and rescheduled for this morning. Except then the weather still wasn't any good, so it was cancelled and rescheduled for 2pm with a 1:45pm pickup, only 15 minutes later than my original plan. I'm so glad everyone - including the weather - agreed to cooperate with my itinerary.

So instead this morning we headed to Te Puia, which is another Maori sacred site, hot springs and geyser. We had enough time to browse through the gift shop before our tour started. Our tour -which covered lots of the Maori history and handcrafts that we didn't learn about last night - reached the geyser just as it started to blow. As we headed back the kiwi house was empty and we were able to go in alone for a better look than we got as part of the tour crowd. We got back to the cafe for lunch just before a few large tour groups. And as we walked past we could see the gift shop was absolutely teeming with people.

Back home for Eleanor's nap and confirmation from Volcanic Air Safaris that the 2pm flight was going ahead, which was a huge relief for everyone. Bevan headed off to the waterfront, Eleanor headed off to bed (and despite insisting she wasn't tired was crashed out cold within 10 minutes) and I headed to the couch for some TV and some more work on my sock knitting.

She woke to a choice between a visit to a lion park or a swim in the motel pool, and she emphatically chose the pool. The end with the steps was just the right depth for Eleanor and in the shade, so we spent almost an hour in there. Going to meet Daddy and see his helicopter land wasn't a strong enough incentive to get out, but the fact that there's a fantastic playground there was, otherwise we'd quite possibly still be in the pool.

Sadly we were about 5 minutes too late to see the helicopter land (OK, so not such perfect timing on that one), but just in time to see Bevan walking up the pier with the happiest, most satisfied look in his face. White Island was the one thing of our entire trip that he really had his heart set on, and I'm so glad it worked out. Apparently they had a smooth flight and plenty of time for a tour of the crater and the sulphur mine abandoned in 1914 when a larger than usual explosion killed all the miners in their sleep. As you can see in the photo, hard hats are compulsory and they even had to don gas masks a few times.

As promised, Eleanor got her time at the playground before we switched babysitting duties and I headed off to the Silver Fern day spa for a Rototua mud pack facial and foot massage, both of which were wonderful (thanks Louise!)

Dinner tonight was a steakhouse that we knew had a kid’s menu. Luckily, since it was Eleanor’s bedtime when we eventually got there, they also had a bucket of markers and some colouring in paper. As you can see, Eleanor has been so inspired by the Maori culture that she self-attempted a face tattoo before we could stop her.