Drive from Waitomo to Turangi with Pureora hiking on the way.

The usual coffee for David, tea for Cynthia, we pack and leave Waitomo’s caves, wending our way on well maintained two-lane roads up, down but not as sharply around a landscape that looks just like Wales: weathered rolling hills with a crag here and there, some dotted with sheep. We’re going east, into the Pureora Forest that covers the Hauhungaroa Range, heading to Turangi where we will climb Mount Tongariro’s Alpine Crossing tomorrow.

As we approach Lake Taupo after driving two-plus hours, Cynthia directs us onto a dirt and gravel road off Route 32 so we can tramp the Rimu Track. The road reminds David of the unpaved, potholed paths in Belize and after a while he says, “This just isn’t right. I don’t think we’re on the right road.”

“Just go a little more,” Cynthia says.

And sure enough, we come to a small grassy parking lot and a park ranger tells us where to start. The forest is lovely and we tramp for about two hours and never see another soul; it’s like the whole earth is ours … it’s all good in the shire. We see no hobbitses. But we do see pine trees of such enormous height and girth in all stages of growth, from saplings to crumbling, lichen- and moss-covered monsters, that we are awed.

We emerge from the forest into a clearing lined with blackberry bushes, pick a bunch, and get back in the car and onto Route 32. After about 20 minutes, Cynthia directs us onto a gravel and dirt path that is supposed to take us to the Waihora Lagoon. After bumping along the eight-foot-wide and winding dirt path for 15 minutes, avoiding a sideswipe from a car careening toward us around a curve, and slowly driving another five minutes, David says, “This just isn’t right. We can’t be on the right road.”

“Just go a little more,” Cynthia says. The proof is in the picture.

We get back on two-lane Route 32, which has scenic overlooks of Lake Taupo and, as you also can see, not enough room for both cars and sheep. The dogs that shepherd them jump out of a small truck about the size of a golf cart with a cage on the back and, when they’ve bustled the sheep through the roadside gate and into the pasture, hop back into their rolling cage and Bob’s your uncle.

Bob is David’s uncle and he would eat his heart out to be staying at The Creel Lodge, a minute’s walk from what locals say is “the fourth best trout-fishing river in the world.” (The first three can be debated but the exact 100-meter bend of the Tongariro River behind our suite of rooms at the lodge is the best spot for the rainbows that must be a minimum of 135 centimeters long. The locals are so proud of their stock that they do not permit restaurants to serve it for fear that high demand would lead to artificial stocking, which inevitably would lead to disease. The only way to eat trout here is to catch it yourself or get someone to give you one.

We shop in a supermarket for dinner, which we prepare in our suite after a few G and Ts. Tonight’s red is another Carol Wisker recommendation: a 2016 Rabbit Ranch from Central Otago. And to bed early because we must wake at 6 a.m. tomorrow.