American writers revel in Lord of the Rings scenery

US visitor Hendrik Hertzberg says the Queenstown area is

Three senior writers from the New Yorker, who were guests at last weekend's Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, have been raving about New Zealand in blogs on the magazine's website.

Chief political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg, who posted a blog yesterday from "Middle-earth" (Queenstown), where he is visiting with colleagues Judith Thurman and Rhonda Sherman, said although he was no fan of the Lord of the Rings books, "we find ourselves in a Hobbity paradise".

"I did see the first of the three Peter Jackson movies and although my attention wandered during the interminable battle scenes, I was transfixed by the landscape," he writes.

"Everything is peculiarly miniaturised ... hardly any people or houses to be seen, though everything looks cared for, in a rough, handicrafted sort of way, by invisible gardeners ... all the animals are half to three-quarters of what I would consider normal size."

Hertzberg fancifully thinks our snow-coated mountains "look as if Zeus, or more likely some Celtic god, would be tempted to reach down with a giant spoon to have a taste".

Hertzberg posted an earlier blog about his welcome at Auckland Airport, saying he was "serenaded by a delightful background sound of birds chirping ... quite a contrast to the brutal f*** you that greets foreigners arriving in the United States.

"Here [in Auckland], the lines are short and the officials polite; at JFK, arriving foreigners run a gauntlet of delays, ugliness, sullen contempt and near chaos while being treated alternately as cattle or potential terrorists."

New Yorker business writer James Surowiecki has blogged about our banking system, saying, "What's curious about the relative health of the New Zealand banking system is that it's dominated ... by four big Australian banks ... all four, while suffering from the effects of the current recession, are firmly profitable and, more important, have avoided most of the big bad bets that other international banks made ... it feels like what New Zealand is going through is something closer to a traditional recession ... one that doesn't have the added dimension of a banking system in crisis.

"The contrast to the overpowering sense of worry that's dominated the US since September ... is striking."

Staff writer and biographer Judith Thurman has blogged about her visit to a powhiri at Unitec's new wharenui, saying their guide, Muriwai Ihakara, warned her group, "Don't be anxious about the unknown - be anxious about the known."

"A sturdy young woman with a delicately tattooed chin and lips ('blue lips' are a traditional emblem of beauty, sex appeal and feminine strength) offered us a deep-throated song," Thurman writes, going on to describe her encounter with Maori culture in glowing terms.

Hertzberg concludes his blog from Queenstown with, "In short, [Middle-earth is] the sort of place, tame, but with a touch of unthreatening wildness, that any Baggins would be reluctant to leave.

"I certainly will be."