New Zealanders have this endearing habit of prefixing the majority of their restaurants, hotels and attractions with "World famous", "Internationally renowned", "Top 10", etc. The implication being that as many people have heard of this little coffee shop at the side of road in Hicksville, NZ as have heard of, say, Britney Spears from Hicksville, USA.

With a bit of willing suspension of disbelief, we decided we must have been living in a cave since we were born to not be aware of the World Famous Napier Art Deco Walk. In order to catch up with the rest of the world, we took the tour. Napier was destroyed by an earthquake in the 30s, and rebuilt almost entirely in the Art Deco style of the times, as pointed out to us by the kindly white-haired lady tour guide. Our favourite example was a brothel that had won accreditation from the Art Deco society of Napier, presumably for its architecture, nothing else.

Apparently, "Cellar Door" is the most beautiful phrase in the English language. We set out to empirically test this theory by next going on a winery tour. After 4 cellar doors and about 30 wines tasted, we had kind of forgotten the point of the experiment (not to mention most of the English language), but discovered a few new favourite wines. Ours wasn't the only dodgy command of the English language - it tooks us a long time (2 hours) to realise that "red swill" was not a wine tasting term, but our South African guide's way telling us about the soil colour.