Let’s be honest — you’ve already Googled New Zealand and seen the same list a hundred times. Hobbiton. Milford Sound. Bungy jumping in Queenstown. They’re great. They’re also on every travel blog written in the last fifteen years, and you’ll share the experience with approximately four hundred other tourists at exactly the same time.
New Zealand is so much weirder and more wonderful than the greatest hits suggest. Once you start digging beneath the surface, you find a country that has somehow managed to build a national identity out of geothermal mud baths, fences covered in underwear, and toilets so beautiful they’ve been granted heritage status. Oh, and if you’re making your way up to Northland and basing yourself with us at Ahipara Adventure Centre — you’re already in one of the most genuinely bizarre and brilliant corners of the country. More on that shortly.
First, let’s take a tour of the weirdest New Zealand has to offer.
The World’s Most Famous Public Toilets — Kawakawa
Yes, really. If you’re driving north through Northland toward the Bay of Islands — which you almost certainly will be if you’re coming to visit us — you need to stop in the small town of Kawakawa to use the bathroom. That is not a sentence that normally appears in a travel article, but this is not a normal bathroom.
The Hundertwasser Toilets are considered the main attraction of Kawakawa and the most photographed toilet in New Zealand, with bus-loads of tourists arriving to view them far outnumbering those who actually come to use the facility.
The backstory is genuinely extraordinary. An exhibition of his work at the Auckland Art Gallery in 1973 changed Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s life. After the opening, he bought a Morris Mini and spent 148 days driving around New Zealand, swimming, meeting locals and falling completely in love with the country. He eventually bought land near Kawakawa, became a New Zealand citizen, and decades later, when the town’s local business association asked if he’d redesign their ageing public conveniences, he said yes.
Covered in multi-coloured tile collages, undulating lines and organic curves, the building features recycled bottles embedded into the concrete and a living tree growing up through the roof and blending with native grasses on top. The quirky loos now draw an estimated 250,000 visitors a year and have been declared a Category 1 historic place — putting them on the same level as Christchurch Cathedral and Auckland’s War Memorial Museum.
They are still fully functional public toilets. Locals use them every day. That might be the most New Zealand fact in this entire article.
A Fence Covered in Thousands of Bras — The Cardrona Valley
Head south to the South Island and you’ll find the Cardrona Valley, a strikingly beautiful stretch of tussock grassland and mountain scenery on the road between Queenstown and Wanaka. And right in the middle of it, draped across an ordinary farm fence, are thousands of bras.
The bras started arriving around 1988 and despite various efforts to remove them over the years, they’re definitively here to stay. Rumour has it that the first few belonged to a group of young women celebrating New Year’s Eve at the nearby Cardrona Hotel. What started as a late-night impulse has since become one of New Zealand’s most-photographed roadside attractions. Locals call it “Bradrona” — which is either clever or terrible, and honestly both.
Over the years, Bradrona has been responsible for donating thousands of dollars to the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation. So it’s both absurd and quietly charitable. Very New Zealand.
A Ceiling of Living Stars Underground — Waitomo Glowworm Caves
If you haven’t heard of the Waitomo Glowworm Caves, prepare to have your expectations exceeded in every possible direction. Set in the heart of the North Island’s lush farming country, these ancient limestone caves contain a species of bioluminescent creature found only in New Zealand — the Arachnocampa luminosa, or glowworm. Thousands of them cling to the cave ceiling and emit a soft blue-green light, creating the effect of a living, breathing night sky underground.
Photography is not permitted in the glowworm areas of the caves because the creatures react negatively to flashlight — and once disturbed, they take up to two hours to return to full luminescence. The caves are private property belonging to a Māori family, and every single person employed there is related. You glide through the caves on a silent underground boat. Nobody speaks. The only light is from the worms above you.
If you want adventure without the gliding silence, you can also go blackwater rafting through the cave system in rubber rings. New Zealand: somehow turning underground rivers into a leisure activity since 1987.
You Can Walk Into a Real Hobbit Village — Hobbiton, Matamata
A working farm near the small town of Matamata was transformed into a film set for the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, and today you can visit the set and see where the magic was created — including the original Hobbit Holes, the Green Dragon Inn, the Party Tree and more.
What makes Hobbiton genuinely strange — in the best way — is how completely real it feels. The hobbit holes have actual front doors. The gardens are maintained year-round. The Green Dragon is a functioning pub where you can sit down and have a drink brewed exclusively for the site. For many fans, a visit to Hobbiton is something of a pilgrimage, and it’s the primary reason they came to New Zealand at all.
The surreal part? It’s set in the middle of a perfectly ordinary sheep farm. You drive through rolling green hills past grazing livestock, and then suddenly: Middle-earth. It works completely.
A Lake That Looks Like Coca-Cola — Northland
Here’s one that most travel blogs skip entirely, and it happens to be practically in your backyard when you stay with us. Coca Cola Lake is found in Doubtless Bay, about an hour north of Kerikeri and 25 minutes from Kaitaia. The water is dark — almost black from above — thanks to natural tannins that leach from the surrounding vegetation. Up close it’s a deep, rich amber colour. It looks exactly like a glass of Coke held up to the light.
It is completely safe to swim in and even drink, and some Māori believe it has healing properties. There’s no entry fee, no tour bus, and most days you’ll have the whole place to yourself. Surreal, genuinely beautiful, and about as far from the tourist trail as you can get.
Driving a Land Yacht on a Beach — And That’s Just the Start
Now here’s where Ahipara comes back into the conversation — because while the attractions above are genuinely extraordinary, what we offer at Ahipara Adventure Centre is the kind of experience that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else on earth.
Ninety Mile Beach at low tide is one of the flattest, widest, most perfectly formed natural surfaces imaginable. We use it as a racetrack. A playground. A canvas. And we’ve been doing it for years.
While the rest of New Zealand is lining you up for bus tours, queues, and carefully managed visitor experiences, you can come to Ahipara and actually do something. Blast across the sand on a quad bike with the Tasman Sea beside you. Sail a blokart faster than you thought possible without ever leaving the beach. Ride a wave at Shipwreck Bay — one of the most celebrated left-hand breaks in the entire Southern Hemisphere. Or climb the dunes that rise up behind the village and ride a sandboard down at a speed that will make you question most of your life decisions.
These aren’t passive experiences. Nobody else is doing it for you. You’re in it.
Why Weird Is Worth It
The thing all of these places have in common — the toilet in Kawakawa, the bra fence in Cardrona, the glowworm caves, the hobbit village, the Coke-coloured lake, and the beach at Ahipara — is that none of them fit neatly into a brochure. They’re the kind of things you can’t fully explain to someone who hasn’t been there. The kind of things you end up talking about for years.
New Zealand doesn’t take itself entirely seriously, and that’s a large part of why it’s so easy to love. It’s a country where a publicly listed heritage building is also a functioning toilet, where a fence covered in lingerie raises money for charity, and where you can sail across a beach in a tiny wind-powered cart on a Tuesday afternoon because why wouldn’t you.
The standard New Zealand itinerary is genuinely excellent. But the weird version? That’s the one worth telling people about.
