The Real Deal

A year on and Rings-related tourist stories still crop up in US papers. This one, originally published in the Washington Post, attempts to find the “real NZ, the part still untouched by the ubiquitous cinema hype.” A whirlwind tour of north and south leaves the writer concluding that “only isolation protects NZ from its own perfection … If [it] could be towed a thousand miles closer to the Northern Hemisphere, 100 million people would live here.”