New Zealand's most unusual places to stay — spanning retired aircraft, converted farm buildings, and structures that politely ignore the laws of conventional architecture — offer five honest accounts of accommodation that goes gloriously beyond the ordinary across both islands.
New Zealand: Obscure and unique attractions
🗺️ Introduction
New Zealand is, by any measure, a country that doesn’t need to try hard. It has mountains, glaciers, fjords, volcanoes and scenery that makes you feel slightly inadequate every time you look out of a car window. You’d think that would be quite enough. But no. New Zealand has decided that the sensible response to all that natural magnificence is to also build enormous fibreglass fish, decorate fences with brassières, and fill trees with plastic chickens. I can only admire the commitment.
We’ve been making our way round both islands over several weeks now, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you don’t have a proper job to go back to and your wife hasn’t yet got tired of your driving. What I hadn’t fully anticipated was how reliably the country would keep producing these little moments of cheerful lunacy, scattered between the lakes and the vineyards and the relentless beauty like punctuation marks. This post is about those moments. None of them are UNESCO listed. None of them will feature in a Lonely Planet centrefold. But every single one of them made us stop the car, get out, look at each other, and say something along the lines of “Well, that’s odd.”
🩲 “Bradrona” – The Bra Fence, Cardrona Valley, Otago
We were coming over the Crown Range Road from Arrowtown, which is the highest sealed road in New Zealand and, I can confirm, a spectacular piece of engineering through entirely magnificent scenery. I was mostly fine with the hairpin bends. We passed the Cardrona Hotel, which has been standing there since 1863 looking like a film set for a western, and I made a mental note to regret not stopping for a drink later. And then, rounding a curve in the Cardrona Valley, we encountered the Bra Fence.
It is exactly what it sounds like. A farm fence. Covered in bras. Hundreds of them, possibly thousands, strung from post to post in every colour and size across a hillside of tussock grass with mountains on all sides. The locals call it “Bradrona,” which is either genius or terrible and probably both. It began in the late 1990s when someone, for reasons that remain pleasingly vague, attached a few bras to a fence. Other people followed. Then more. Now it’s a proper institution, associated with breast cancer awareness and fundraising, with a donation box on site and messages written on many of the bras in memory of people who have died. By some point in recent years, donations had climbed to NZ$180,000. So while it looks, at first glance, like the aftermath of a very disorganised laundry day, it turns out to be unexpectedly moving once you know the context.
We pulled over. We took photographs. We stood in silence looking at a fence covered in lingerie in the middle of the New Zealand high country. Then we got back in the car and drove on, because really there is nothing more to say or do at that point. The bra fence has been seen. Life continues.
🍎 Giant Fruit Monument, Cromwell, Otago
Cromwell is a tidy Central Otago town that sits on the shores of Lake Dunstan, which was created when the Clyde Dam flooded the original town centre in the 1980s. The old buildings were carefully removed stone by stone and reassembled into a heritage precinct nearby, which says something admirable about how seriously New Zealand takes its history. And then, at the entrance to town, they put up an enormous cluster of fibreglass fruit.
The Cromwell fruit statue went up in 1989 to celebrate the district’s apple, pear, apricot and stone fruit industries, and to declare the town the “Fruit Bowl of the South.” Rather than print leaflets to that effect, they built something the size of a modest bungalow. There were apples. There were pears. There were stone fruit. All of them improbably large and glinting in the sun. It is not sophisticated. It is not subtle. But it does the job with tremendous confidence, and I have a certain respect for that. Standing beside it, hands on hips in the traditional stance of a man assessing engineering decisions, I found it impossible to be grumpy.
Central Otago grew its reputation on fruit long before the wine labels and tasting rooms arrived. The climate — hot summers, cold winters, long sunshine hours — concentrates the sugars in ways that travel brochures try and fail to describe. The giant peach sitting by the roadside is essentially a very large, fibreglass tribute to generations of orchardists who got up at three in the morning to keep frost off their blossom. That seems about right to me.
🐔 The Chook Tree, Near Hector, West Coast Otago
There are many reasons to stop a car in rural New Zealand. Sheep, mainly. Stunning views. Occasional mechanical failure. What I had not anticipated was stopping because of poultry lodged several metres up a tree. And yet there we were, pulled over beside State Highway 67 near the tiny settlement of Hector, staring upward at what can only be described as a small arboreal chicken convention.
The Chook Tree — a “chook” being the local term for a chicken, and a perfectly good word — is a fairly ordinary roadside tree that someone, at some point in the recent past, decided to fill with toy hens. Plastic ones, rubber ones, ceramic ones, faded ones that had been bleached by the West Coast weather into something faintly spectral. It apparently began as a single toy chicken placed in the branches by a local, for reasons that accounts vary on and nobody seems entirely certain about. Someone else added another one. Then another. Then, because this is New Zealand and people here have a particular appreciation for cheerful collective lunacy, it grew into what it is now.
Hector itself was a coal mining community named after the geologist Sir James Hector, who I suspect would have raised a professional eyebrow at what his name is now associated with. The whole West Coast has that history — small communities built around coal seams that were worked hard and then declined. The Chook Tree feels like a natural outgrowth of that spirit: resourceful, unpretentious, comfortable with the absurd. You can keep your interpretive visitor centres. Sometimes a tree full of plastic hens does the job rather nicely.
⚙️ Steampunk HQ, Oamaru, North Otago
Oamaru is a coastal town that looks, in its historic Victorian precinct, as though it has been preserved in amber and is very pleased about it. The buildings are constructed from local whitestone limestone, and they are genuinely beautiful. It is one of those places that keeps offering you another thing to look at just as you think you’ve finished.
Down by the harbour, in a former grain elevator that has not been cleaned up or softened in any way, sits Steampunk HQ. Outside the entrance stands a monumental locomotive built from salvaged metal and scrap components that, at intervals, shoots controlled flames from its smokestack. Inside, it is darker, more atmospheric, and entirely bonkers in the most satisfying way. Mechanical sculptures built from chains, gears, pipes and salvaged engine parts line the walls. Some sit still. Others move when you press the buttons, and we pressed every button that looked remotely pressable, because that is the correct approach. Pistons moved. Gears turned. Lights flashed. Metal clanked with pleasing conviction.
There is also a mirrored infinity chamber filled with shifting lights that briefly deprives you of any reliable sense of direction, which is slightly alarming but mostly excellent. The whole thing is, genuinely, a work of considerable craftsmanship by local artists who saw an empty industrial building and decided to fill it with brass-and-rivet imagination. It opened in 2011 and has been pleasantly confusing visitors ever since. We left mildly over-stimulated, thoroughly entertained, and rather glad that Oamaru exists.
🐟 Salmon Sam, Rakaia, Canterbury
New Zealand has a long and cheerful tradition of building large things beside roads to make motorists stop. Giant carrots, enormous sheepdogs, corrugated iron sculptures. Rakaia has gone one better. It has a twelve-metre fibreglass salmon mounted beside the main road, mid-leap, as though attempting to clear the traffic and escape to sea.
The salmon is known locally as Salmon Sam, which I think we can all agree is a good name. Rakaia sits on the Canterbury Plains near the wide, glacially-fed Rakaia River, and it is, the town will tell you very firmly, the salmon fishing capital of New Zealand. The Chinook salmon introduced here from North America in the nineteenth century adapted extraordinarily well, and the river draws anglers in considerable numbers, all of them with that particular expression of grim determination familiar to anyone who has spent time near people who fish.
As vegans, we were not exactly the target demographic for any of this. We had no rod, no bait, and no interest in learning to gut anything. But we could certainly admire the statue. Salmon Sam stands several metres high, painted in realistic silvery tones, with an open mouth that suggests either fierce determination or mild astonishment at its own dimensions. We stopped, took photographs, spent a few moments looking up at an airborne seafood monument, and drove on considerably happier than before we arrived.
🥾 Giant Gumboot, Taihape, Manawatū-Whanganui
Taihape sits on State Highway 1 in the lower North Island, a small rural service town surrounded by sheep and cattle country. It describes itself as the gumboot capital of New Zealand, which is not a title many places would fight over, but which Taihape has embraced with considerable enthusiasm.
The Giant Gumboot was built around the year 2000 to mark the millennium, constructed from corrugated iron and number-eight wire — materials that feel exactly right for a rural New Zealand town where gumboots are everyday working gear rather than ironic accessories. It stands roughly three metres high and about five and a half metres long, which is significantly larger than expected when you see it up close rather than in photographs. The town’s connection to the gumboot goes back further than the statue. Taihape is linked to Fred Dagg, the fictional gumboot-wearing farmer created by the comedian John Clarke, which helped cement a reputation for dry rural humour. The statue itself felt genuinely rooted in working life rather than pure tourism, which is quite a difficult thing to achieve with a giant boot.
We spent a few unhurried minutes taking photographs and reading the small details. There was no need to linger, which suited us perfectly. It was a simple, cheerful pause in a long drive, and the gumboot delivered exactly what it promised.
🥕 Giant Carrot, Ohakune, Manawatū-Whanganui
Not far from the slopes of Mount Ruapehu, in a town that takes its vegetable very seriously, stands the Giant Carrot of Ohakune. Ohakune is the carrot-growing capital of New Zealand — the fertile volcanic soils around the mountain apparently produce carrots of some distinction — and the town has marked this fact with a large orange fibreglass specimen beside the road.
It is, as these things go, cheerfully committed. The carrot sits outside what was an adventure park, bright orange and vaguely triumphant, the embodiment of a town that has looked at its primary industry and decided to celebrate it in the most visible way possible. Drivers coming through Ohakune cannot miss it. Whether they particularly want to see it is another question, but the carrot appears not to worry about that. It is a carrot. It is large. It is there. What more do you want?
We stopped, as one does. Took photographs, as one must. Agreed that it was a perfectly respectable giant vegetable and drove on, which is all anyone can really do.
🐄 Herd of Cows, Morrinsville, Waikato
Morrinsville, in the Waikato, is dairy country. The surrounding landscape is all green paddocks, black-and-white Holstein Friesians, and the kind of contentment that rural prosperity generates when it has been going on long enough. The town decided to honour all of this by commissioning a herd of painted fibreglass cows and placing them throughout the town centre as an outdoor art installation.
This sounds simple and it is simple, but it works rather well. The cows turn up in unexpected places — outside shops, at corners, in small parks — each one decorated by a different artist with a different design. Some are painted realistically. Some are abstract. Some are patterns. Some look as though the artist had consumed something interesting before starting. The effect is that Morrinsville becomes a sort of accidental art gallery, and the cows, rather than looking incongruous, feel entirely at home in a town that has always had a cheerful relationship with its agricultural identity.
There are worse ways to mark what a town does and who it is. Morrinsville grows dairy, and the cows are everywhere. It is honest, unpretentious, and rather good fun.
🗿 Tokoroa’s Talking Poles, Waikato
Tokoroa is a North Island town that grew up around the timber industry, and like many such towns it has had its ups and downs as the industry changed and contracted. What it does have, lined along its main streets, is a remarkable series of carved wooden totem poles created by Pacific and Māori artists, each one telling a story connected to the town’s multicultural community.
They are called the Talking Poles, which is a good name. They do rather talk, if you take the time to look. They represent the diverse communities that came to Tokoroa to work in the timber mills — Pacific Islanders, Māori, Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent) — and they sit together in a way that reflects a genuinely mixed community rather than a theme park interpretation of one. Each pole is serious work. The carving is accomplished, the symbolism deliberate. They give Tokoroa something distinctive and meaningful, which is no small thing for a town that has had to be resilient.
We drove through slowly, took several stops, and spent considerably more time than planned. They are worth the detour.
🐶 Giant Metal Dog and Sheep, Tirau, Waikato
Tirau is a small town in the Waikato that solved the problem of how to attract passing motorists by making two of its buildings look like animals. One is shaped like a corrugated iron sheep. The other, next to it, is shaped like a corrugated iron dog. The dog houses an information centre. The sheep houses a shop. Both of them are enormous.
This is exactly the sort of thing that makes New Zealand a reliable source of entertainment. Tirau had a practical problem — it needed to draw traffic off State Highway 1 — and it solved it with what appears to have been almost no internal conflict whatsoever. Let’s make the buildings look like livestock. Done. It works extraordinarily well. We have seen them before, years ago, but they repay repeat viewing. Standing on the main street looking at a fifteen-foot corrugated iron sheep with a door in its side is an experience that never really gets old.
🧙 Hobbiton, Matamata, Waikato
I am aware that Hobbiton is not exactly obscure. Peter Jackson chose the Alexander family’s sheep farm outside Matamata in the late 1990s and it has been drawing visitors ever since, first for filming, then as a permanent set after the farm was transformed for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. The rolling green hills of the Waikato, it turned out, looked exactly like the Shire, which is either a remarkable coincidence or very good work by whoever wrote the books.
I include it here because visiting in person is genuinely different from expecting it. The set is larger than photographs suggest, the detail is extraordinary, and the combination of craft and natural landscape is difficult to resist even for those of us who approach organised tourism with a degree of suspicion. The Hobbit holes are built into a hillside with small vegetable gardens, washing lines, and personal effects that suggest actual habitation. The Green Dragon inn, at the bottom, serves a proprietary ale that I cannot personally vouch for as a vegan but which other people seemed very enthusiastic about.
We went in slightly guarded and came out rather charmed. I am not entirely comfortable admitting that, but there it is.
🚻 Hundertwasser Toilets, Kawakawa, Northland
And finally, the most famous public conveniences in the southern hemisphere. The Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser spent the later part of his life in Northland and had strong feelings about architecture — specifically that it should work with nature rather than against it, and that straight lines and uniform surfaces were an affront to humanity. When Kawakawa, the small coal-mining town turned rural service centre, needed a new public toilet block, Hundertwasser designed one as a gift, on the condition that local people helped build it.
The result is a building that ignores virtually every conventional rule of architecture. There are no straight walls. The floor slopes gently inside. The roof is planted with grass and small trees. Every surface is covered in mosaics of recycled tiles, glass bottles and reclaimed bricks, nothing hidden or smoothed over. Windows are irregular shapes. The whole thing looks like it grew naturally from the street rather than being constructed on it. It sits right in the middle of Kawakawa’s main road, next to the old railway line, impossible to miss, and it has been drawing visitors steadily ever since it was completed.
What is slightly extraordinary is that it still functions as a perfectly ordinary public toilet. Locals use it daily. Visitors arrive with cameras, stand slightly unsure how to behave around something this famous and this ordinary simultaneously, and then get on with using it. Hundertwasser believed beauty should not be reserved for galleries or wealthy homes but should be part of everyday life. On that evidence, he had a point.
🎬 Wētā Workshop, Miramar, Wellington
Wētā Workshop sits in Miramar, a perfectly ordinary Wellington suburb that looks, from the outside, as though it might manufacture plumbing fittings. Which I suspect is entirely deliberate. Founded in the early nineties by Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger, it began as a modest workshop making props for local productions. Then along came Peter Jackson with an ambitious plan involving hobbits, volcanoes, rings and an alarming amount of walking, and everything changed rather dramatically.
Our guide, Bianca, had the brisk efficiency of someone who knows that if you give tourists an inch, they will try to pocket a goblin ear. The tour began in a room containing a wall-length filmography and — almost casually — a BAFTA and an Oscar sitting in a display case as though someone had tidied up and forgotten to put them away. We were shown prosthetics, armour and creature parts. We stood next to Sauron’s full suit of black, spiked armour from The Lord of the Rings, which made me feel like a garden gnome. We held a steel sword, which was brutally heavy, and an aluminium stunt version, which explained rather a lot about why medieval battles were unpleasant. In the sculpting room, Kim Beaton handed us foil to have a go at building a form. My creation bore no resemblance to anything known to biology. The professionals were very kind about it, which worried me slightly. Despite the fame and the awards, what struck me most was that so much of the work is still done by hand — sculpted, forged, painted — by talented people quietly making extraordinary things in what looks like a very well-organised shed.
💭 Reflections
What strikes me most, looking back over all of these places, is that not one of them is trying to be anything other than exactly what it is. Nobody built the bra fence to attract investment. Cromwell didn’t erect a giant peach to win awards. Kawakawa got a toilet block because someone who cared about architecture cared about the town. Taihape has a boot because it is boot country and felt that should be acknowledged.
There is an honesty to all of this that I find more appealing than it perhaps deserves. New Zealand is a country that does dramatic very well — the scenery makes sure of that — but it also does the quietly eccentric with some skill, and the two turn out to complement each other rather nicely. After several weeks of glaciers, mountains and genuinely life-altering coastal drives, it’s the bra fence and the plastic chickens that I keep coming back to. They remind you that people live here, and that people are, at the bottom of things, fairly strange in the best possible way.
Also include from the same website the Weta Studios
17:23
Let me fetch the Weta Workshop post from your website.
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