The Waikato is a region of rolling dairy country in the middle of New Zealand's North Island, about ninety minutes south of Auckland. It takes its name from the Waikato River — at 425 km, the longest river in New Zealand — which runs the length of the region before entering the Tasman Sea west of Auckland. The landscape is lush green pasture, Holstein-Friesian cows, and the flat-topped cone of Mount Pirongia rising above everything else to the west. It is the heartland of the New Zealand dairy industry and a place most travellers drive through without stopping — which is a small shame, because the region hides some genuinely remarkable things.
The main reason to come is Waitomo, about an hour south of the city of Hamilton, where a network of limestone caves has been carved out by underground rivers over thirty million years. The ceilings of the most famous — the Glowworm Cave — are blanketed with thousands of tiny bioluminescent larvae (the New Zealand glowworm, unique to these islands) whose sticky threads trap flying insects and whose blue-green light turns the ceiling of the cave into a starry sky. You glide through in a small boat in silence. For the more adventurous, black water rafting tours take you through the same caves on inflatable tubes, floating through the galleries of glowworms and leaping small underground waterfalls. Both experiences are unforgettable.
The other Waikato attraction that has become globally famous is Hobbiton, near the small town of Matamata — the set of the Shire from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, preserved after filming as a permanent visitor attraction. Forty-four hobbit holes set into the hillside, the Green Dragon Inn where you can drink the specially brewed ales, the party tree, and the whole idyllic green landscape that Jackson picked precisely because it looks like Tolkien's drawings. It is unapologetically a set tour, but extraordinarily well done.
The region's main city is Hamilton, a pleasant river city with the excellent Hamilton Gardens — 21 themed gardens ranging from a Japanese contemplation garden to a Renaissance Italian one, and one of the best small botanical gardens in the Southern Hemisphere. The west-coast surf beach at Raglan, just over the Waikato range from Hamilton, has some of the best left-hand point breaks in the world and a laid-back surf-town vibe that makes it worth a detour. And east across the Hauraki Gulf, the Coromandel Peninsula — technically part of the wider Waikato region — is the picture-book New Zealand of white-sand beaches, kauri forest, and Hot Water Beach, where you can dig your own thermal bath in the sand at low tide.
