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‘At Warbrick as he crosses the height of summer, we would get maybe 4,000 people a day,” says James the bridge into Whakarewarewa, a tiny Māori village pocketed between hundreds of steaming, bubbling geo-thermal pools – a place like no other and one at the heart of New Zealand’s tourism industry.

But today there are no tourists in sight. When New Zealand shut its border two years ago as the Covid pandemic hit, Whakarewarewa lost