MTG Hawke’s Bay (formerly the Hawke’s Bay Museum & Art Gallery) has a wide variety of exhibits including dinosaurs, Māori culture and local history. The exhibits relating to the 1931 earthquakes are particularly interesting.
MTG Hawke’s Bay
Art deco walking tours
Napier’s architecture is the city’s main attraction. Just walking around town will give you a good idea of the Art Deco craze that swept through Napier in the 1930s. The Art Deco Trust conducts walking tours of the city that depart from the Art Deco Shop in Tennyson Street. Alternatively, you can buy a self-guided walk booklet for $5 and do the walk yourself. The tour is 1½km long and takes up to two hours to complete.
Tairawhiti Museum
The excellent Tairawhiti Museum complex features exhibits on local history with a fine collection of Māori artefacts. The maritime exhibits include displays of shipwrecks including the bridge house of the Star of Canada, which ran aground on Kaiti Beach in 1912. The museum also has an exhibit of historic surfboards.
Volcanic Activity Centre
The Volcanic Activity Centre in Turangi is a small science museum that has exhibits explaining the geothermal and volcanic activity in the Taupo Volcanic Zone. The centre boasts an earthquake simulator, a live model geyser and an interactive tornado machine.
The centre is located adjacent to Turangi’s i-SITE Visitor Information Centre.
Orakei Korako Cave & Thermal Park
Orakei Korako (also known as the Hidden Valley) is one of the world’s largest geothermal areas, famed for both its geysers and its silica terraces including the jade-green Emerald Terrace.
Although two-thirds of the active thermal area – some 200 hot springs and 70 geysers – were flooded when a lake was formed for a hydro power plant in 1961, Orakei Korako remains the largest geyser field in New Zealand with 35 active geysers.
The most famous geyser is the Diamond Geyser, an unpredictable geyser whose eruptions of up to 9m sometimes last for several hours and other times only for a few minutes.
Orakei Korako is also home to the Ruatapu Cave – one of only two caves in the world to exist in a geothermal field.
Access to the park is by a ferry trip across Lake Ohakuri. This impressive thermal park features a dazzling array of thermal features that include hot springs, geysers and silica terraces and there is also a rare geothermal cave with a warm mineral pool.
Mercury Bay Museum
Mercury Bay Museum is a small museum that has displays on Whitianga’s local history, including exhibits on shipwrecks and Māori history.
Driving Creek Railway
Located just 3km north of Coromandel Town, the Driving Creek Railway is the creation of potter Barry Brickell, who built the country’s only narrow gauge railway over a period of 26 years. The one-hour train trip passes replanted kauri forest and it includes a unique double-decker viaduct plus two spirals and a great view from the ridge-top terminus.
Thames Historical Museum
The Thames Historical Museum is a small museum that has displays about the town’s colourful history including exhibits about the gold rush, the timber industry and the life of early settlers.
Goldmine Experience
The Goldmine Experience is a re-created gold mine that sits on the original site of the 1868 Golden Crown claim and features working mining equipment dating from the 1870s. A visit includes a tour of three original tunnels.
Hobbiton Movie Set
The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies were filmed on farmland near Matamata and the Hobbiton Movie Set can be visited by tour.
The set was constructed a year prior to filming to allow weeds to grow so the set would look more realistic and lived in. It was built as a film set meaning that it was not built to last longer than the initial film shoot (like many film sets corners were cut with sets made from plywood and polystyrene). However, in 2010 the set was rebuilt in a more permanent manner for the filming of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
The 5.5 ha (14 acre) film set features 44 hobbit holes, although it is only possible to enter a few of them. The interior shots were filmed in a studio in Wellington so don’t expect the interior of the holes to look the same as in the films.
Despite tours being relatively pricey, the set is a very popular tourist attraction attracting over half a million visitors since tours began in 2002.
The set is now home to The Shire’s Rest Cafe, where you can enjoy a second breakfast and the Green Dragon Inn (a replica of the Green Dragon that featured in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies) was opened in 2012.
Admission is by two-hour tour and tours can get booked out during busy periods so it is best to book in advance to ensure that you have space on the tour.