Recursive Eloquent Relationship set up

I am new to Laravel and I struck an interesting logic twist I want to implement as Eloquent relationships in each class, so would appreciate some advice as I am not getting the expected output (rather than cheating and using query builder!). I thought this previous question was very useful but I cannot get it working all the same.

Two tables: regions and neighbour_regions

Table: `regions`         
id   region              
1    argentina           
2    brazil              
....

Table: `neighbour_regions`
id   region_id    neighbour_region_id 
1    1            2
2    1            3
....

I have a class for each table and set up recursive relationships as follows:

Class: Region

/**
 * A Region as a Neighbour to another Region
 */
public function region()
{
    return $this->hasMany(NeighbourRegion::class, 'region_neighbour_id', 'id');
}

Class NeighbourRegion

/**
 * A Region has many Neighbours
 */
public function childrenNeighbourRegions()
{
    return $this->hasMany(NeighbourRegion::class, 'region_id', 'neighbour_region_id');
}

/**
 * A Region has many Neighbours
 */
public function allChildrenNeighbours()
{
    return $this->childrenNeighbourRegions()->with('allChildrenNeighbours');
}

I then call the request to list all neighbours to a region in my controller like so:

    $region = Region::where('region', '=', $region_name)->get();

    return NeighbourRegion::with('allChildrenNeighbours')->where('region_id', '=', $region[0]->region_id)->get();

But I end up with an empty collection when I pass the value argentina to it (for example). I can clearly see the value getting to the first call and the id I resolve from it for the second call is correct. What I would like access to is the region (by name) and each neighbouring region (by name also).

What am I missing with the relationship set up? Many thanks!!

via Chebli Mohamed