Camping it up on a culinary Kiwi tour

People go to New Zealand for lots of reasons: the outstanding scenery; the skiing in the South Island; the beaches in the North; the delusion that they're going to encounter a hobbit. But there was one thing that no one, ever, went for - the food. Until recently, if you had asked for Kiwi cuisine you would probably have been served a sloppy shepherd's pie or a throat-laceratingly dry roast. Any local could tell you that there were 10 times more sheep than people on the two islands, but that didn't mean they knew how to cook them.Thanks partly to its wine boom, and partly to a generation of Kiwis with well-travelled tastebuds, New Zealand has begun to realise its own potential, from its wealth of seafood to its locally reared farm produce. My friend Matthew and I have arrived for a two-week road trip with a simple plan: to spend a week exploring the local flavours before attempting to recreate them ourselves.

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