On the road: Hamilton, Milan ... ahh, Auckland

By TONY WALL

International fashion model and recording artist Tamsyn Rose has it all - beauty, brains, glamour, a sense of humour, not to mention the singing voice of an angel.

Maybe I'm dazed by love.

We found this rose in her hometown of Hamilton while we were passing through on our length-of-the-country road trip.

The 22-year-old former Miss Waikato is carving out a modelling career in Milan, one of the world's fashion capitals.

She has spent the past five weeks staying with her family and will return to Italy on Saturday.

Miss Rose won Miss Waikato in 1996 and was runner-up in Miss New Zealand the following year.

She won contracts in Sydney, then Japan, before taking her chances in the cut-throat modelling scene in Milan.

At 172cm, she is slightly too short for catwalk modelling, so she concentrates on catalogue, poster, lingerie and bathing suit work.

"I'm not a skinny rake - I've got curves," she says with a laugh.

She has learned to speak Italian and has been signed by top agency Names, earning up to $3500 for a day's work in Milan.

"It's a great city but it's dirty - there's dog poop in the streets and you're always having to avoid it. It's disgusting."

So how does the Waikato look to a woman becoming accustomed to Milan?

Fabulous, apparently.

There's the people and the wide open spaces and the clean air and ...

Miss Rose wants to focus more on her singing career in future - she trained for seven years in Hamilton as an opera singer - and recently signed to a record label.

Last October, she released an original single called Let Go.

She talks of performing on Italian television and filming a video for her single.

We hit the road through Miss Rose's Waikato and listen to her CD as we drive north. It has a techno beat and, yes, maybe her voice does sound a bit like Madonna.

We follow the beat through the rolling Waikato countryside.

As we drive up the southern slopes of the Bombay Hills, we start to feel a strong sense of anticipation at seeing Auckland.

We are hoping for fine weather as we come over the hill so we can see the sprawling city ahead of us. But, maybe more fittingly, it's cloudy and hazy.

The sheer enormity of the city, with its huge volumes of motorway traffic, hits you.

After the empty roads of the South Island and the sparse drive through the Volcanic Plateau, we have hit the place where cars are.

For most of our trip, we've been driving through towns and villages.

For the first time we have come to a city that can claim to be of international size and significance - even if at the smaller end of the city scale.

It's a beautiful place, with its hills, volcanoes, harbours and skyscrapers. And the variety of faces - brown, black, yellow - is almost a relief after two weeks of seeing almost exclusively white.

It borders on sacrilege to say it in most parts of New Zealand, but in my opinion, Auckland is the best city or town in New Zealand. Try telling that to the heartland.

Feature: On the road with Tony and Mark