Matamata

Forty four round doors are set into the hillside and gardeners keep the plots up. The visit runs two hours with a guide, and nobody wanders it alone.

A working tavern closes the route, and one drink comes with the ticket. It was built in timber with a working hearth, so the inside stays dim.

Farms around the town let visitors into the shed at milking time. It happens twice, before dawn and in the evening, so the booking follows the hour.

At 153m this is the tallest fall on the north island, with a lookout forty five minutes up. Carrying on to the top makes it a six hour return.

Racehorses are bred here and sent abroad, and some studs take visitors. The animals are highly strung, so people stay where they are put.

Twenty minutes away a spring of water runs so clear it reads blue, followed on a boardwalk. The water spends about a century moving through volcanic rock before it surfaces.

The town built its information office with a round door and a thatched roof to match the set. Buses to the film location leave from here.

An old route crosses the range east of town through bush deep enough to swallow sound. Rain turns the ground to mud and the footing goes.

Roads out of town run straight between paddocks with cattle along every fence. Traffic is light, which makes them good for cycling.

No large town stands nearby, so the stars come out fully. Step into the yard of a farm stay and the milky way is simply there.

A concrete lookout tower raised in 1882 by the landowner Firth, just east of town. A relocated schoolhouse, church and post office stand around it like a pioneer village. Up the cramped stairs inside, pasture rolls out to the Kaimai hills.

A geyser in the domain of Te Aroha, a spa town to the north, said to be the only one anywhere that spouts hot soda water. Edwardian timber bathhouses still stand around it. It goes up roughly every 40 minutes, so wait on a park bench.

Riverside gardens in Hamilton to the west, each walled theme separate: Italian Renaissance, Chinese scholar, Indian Mughal and more. In the Surrealist Garden giant doors and chairs shrink visitors to doll size. Allow two hours to see every enclosure.

A forested mountain ringed by a 47km fence that keeps out rats and stoats, an inland island for wildlife. Takahe and kiwi live in an enclosure by the southern entrance. From the steel tower above the canopy, native birds fly past at branch height.

A long lake formed by damming the Waikato River, host of the World Rowing Championships in 1978 and 2010. On its flat surface crews train every dawn. Sit on the lakeside lawn at sunrise and watch boats slide through the mist.

Thousands of glowworm larvae hang from a limestone ceiling, shining like blue stars. Chief Tane Tinorau and surveyor Fred Mace first explored it by raft in 1887. The tour ends drifting by boat through a pitch-dark channel, and no photos are allowed inside.