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The farther the country is from civilization, the less known it is.

The peculiarity of New Zealand in its geographical isolation from the world, the nearest neighbors – Australia, Tonga, Fiji – are thousands of kilometers away from it. This direction becomes more tempting in the eyes of the traveler. Which of your acquaintances can boast that they have visited New Zealand?

If you are going to go on a trip to the edge of the world, you should pay special attention to these 10 places in New Zealand:

Hobbiton

Hobbiton is a village built specifically for the filming of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. New Zealand’s main attraction is the town of Matamata. Every year tens of thousands of John Ronald Tolkien fans come here to see a piece of their favorite fairy tale with their own eyes.

It all started in 1999, when director Peter Jackson, while traveling to New Zealand, found the perfect place to portray the village of hobbits. The locals were delighted to be involved in the scenery project. The film crew spent more than a year building them.

The New Zealand Army was even sent to help – the road to the village was built by soldiers. All the houses and household details of the hobbits are made of either wood or plastic – no cardboard fake decorations!

Milford Sound Bay

The author of the books about Mowgli, John Rudyard Kipling, was difficult to surprise with the beauty of nature. The writer traveled a lot and saw everything. But when he visited the Gulf of Milford Sound, he recognized this place as one of the most beautiful and called “The Eighth Wonder of the World”.

The bay is located in the southwestern part of New Zealand’s Southern Island, where the Tasman Sea crashes into the land for almost ten kilometers, forming long, hidden behind the rocks fjords. Although difficult to reach, Milford Sound is now one of New Zealand’s most popular tourist destinations, with more than half a million tourists arriving each year.

The Franz Joseph Glacier

There was a girl named Hinehukatere. She loved climbing the mountains, and one day she convinced her fiancé Tava to go with her. The journey turned into a tragedy: the guy died in a landslide, and Hinehukatere was bitter and cried for a long time.

So much so that she wept tears on the whole glacier. This legend is probably a Maori legend, living near the Franz Josef glacier, illustrates the safety of hiking.

The Franz Josef Glacier is located in the western part of New Zealand’s South Island. It is the fastest glacier in the world: due to the melting of the waters that feed it, the glacier moves at a speed of about 2 meters per hour, making it possible to cover a decent distance in 24 hours.

Fox’s glacier

Unlike the Franz Joseph Glacier, the Fox Glacier does not shorten, but lengthens. Approximately four metres per month. The reason is regular snowfalls at the beginning of the glacier in the New Zealand Alps.

The peculiarity of the Fox glacier is that it comes quite close to the coast, not reaching the ocean only 19 kilometers. The contrast between green grass and ice is very spectacular, with hundreds of thousands of tourists and skiers coming to the Fox Glacier every year.

Tongariro National Park

One of the oldest national parks in the world, Tongariro, was founded in 1887, when the Maori Aboriginal people handed over the lands to the British Crown so that they would not be taken over by Europeans. Tongariro occupies approximately 800 square kilometers in the central part of the North Island.

The park is essentially a volcanic desert where the main tourist attractions are active (three of them are Ngauruhoe, Ruapehu and Tongariro) and extinct volcanoes. On the slopes of Ngauruhoe, Peter Jackson filmed episodes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

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