37. The Road from Hobbiton - Day 9

Day 9.

The day in numbers:

282 km driven.

1 geyser seen.
Times breathed in at the wrong time and got a lung full of sulphur steam: 12
1 seven foot tall, 25 stone Maori with full facial tattoos walked into.
Lucky escapes: 1

Today's map:

O - Rotorua. P - Whakatane. Q - Gisborne

Rotorua is one of the 'must visit' destinations in the North Island for backpackers apparently. Although to be perfectly honest it is not as great as all the posters and leaflets say it is. Granted, I didn't do every activity on offer, as I was only there overnight and the following morning, but I wasn't impressed. 

One of the major attractions is a 'Maori experience' where you go and watch the natives dance and cook corn on the cob in water boiled by the earth. I didn't do that, however later on in the day in a village near Whakatane called Ohope, I literally walked into the biggest man I have ever seen. He was a Maori with tribal tattoos covering his face, arms and legs and I expect everywhere else too. If I was one of Captain Cook's men charged with taking some land of this local, I would probably wouldn't be too keen. I don't think he even felt me charge into him, thankfully, because I can't run very fast in my flip-flops.

So back in Rotorua, instead of the Maori show, I went to look at the Lady Knox Geyser. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, there was a mini grandstand all round it and people crowded round for its timely eruption at 10:15 am. They obviously can't predict when it is naturally going to blow, so they trigger it once a day by dropping some soap down the hole to break the surface tension of the water. This is what happened:

It was actually pretty impressive, shooting water about 30/40 feet in the air, but it did seem a bit sterilised with the crowds, and the bloke in the hat. Lady Knox Geyser is in a big geothermal park, similar to the Craters of the Moon park I went to near Taupo. I breathed in more sulphur gases (it really is disgusting), and walked around to take a few snaps.

They shouldn't really have this sign. If you see water bubbling and turning into steam and want to touch it then you should be allowed to, it's called evoloution - survival of not-idiots.

I had a few hours to kill before I headed off to Gisborne. So I went to get that panoramic view of the big lake and the island in the lake. The skyline is similar to the one in Queenstown, except not as dramatic, or as good. But the view, beyond the town, was impressive.

The drive from Rotorua to Gisborne (via Whakatane) was pretty awesome. First driving along the edges of a few lakes, then driving along the coast, then driving through incredible Waioeka Gorge. I didn't really photograph the forested gorge, because I was busy staying on the road (I have included a picture of some trees though).

At Gisborne, I had a drive around and thought it was one of the nicest places I had been to so far (in fact the whole of the East Cape and Hawke's Bay is pretty awesome). I wish I had an extra week for my trip so I could have driven the whole length of the Pacific Coast Highway, which runs from Auckland all the way down the coast to Napier. I cut the corner to go straight from Opotiki to Gisborne (see map at the top), the route around the edge of the Cape is meant to be one of the best drives in the country.

Gisborne was the first city in the world to see the sun rise, until Somoa, the capital of which is of course Apia, jumped over the international date line (a year or so ago) to get ahead. I wasn't up to see the sun rise, but I did see it go down, before I went to bed.

Right, that is all for now. I'll be back soon. 

36. The Road from Hobbiton - Day 8

Day 8.

The day in numbers:

147 km driven.

Mountains walked up: 1

Room for maneuver in hired wetsuit: 0.

4 waves successfully caught.

Approx. 30 wipe-outs.

Litres of sea water swallowed: 30.

Map of Day 8's drive:

N (hidden behind M) - Mount Maunganui. O - Te Puke. P - Rotorua

I am going to start this blog entry with a moan about hostel showers. Since I left my bungalow, I don't think I have been in a shower that has been put together with an ounce of common sense.

The most common problem is a lack of hooks to hang clothes and towel on. Seeing as the showers are always a few corridors, if not stories from my room, it is the done thing to take clothes with you. Mixed dorms dictate this protocol too. Only one hook to keep the towel and two sets of clothes from the wet floor, results in an peed off Fred in wet clothes.

The next issue with most hostel showers is the height of the shower head, which usually only moves horizontally. At 5'11, I am pretty average height, especially in New Zealand where young males are routinely placed in grow-bags from the age of 5. The vast majority of shower heads are at shoulder height, great if I didn't want to get my head wet, but I do, to wash it.

Another problem is the temperature control. I think they try to simplify the options to an extent that anybody could understand. So one lever goes from off to cold to boiling hot in about 5 degrees of motion. That is about a milimetre separating 1st degree burns from spontaneous, ice-water induced falsetto. The shower I went in today had this lever at arse height, so whenever I moved slightly to the left it turned it off, and upon moving slightly right it boiled me like a new potato.

Driving in very hot weather means a good shower is a much sought after luxury. I don't appreciate it being more hard work to wash at the end of the day, then it was to travel a couple of hundred kilometres.

I also don't appreciate a little sign asking me to dry the shower after use. That is plainly ridiculous. I left the cubicle walls wet, like everyone else who has ever had a shower...


Back to the journey returning from Hobbiton. I woke up nice an early in Mount Maunganui, and felt like a bit of exercise was needed. The first mission was to trot up the actual mount. On looking through the photos I took on Day 8, I realised that I didn't actually take any pictures of the mountain. Except this one that isn't really of the mountain, and pretty blurry.

Either way it is a big hill at the end of a spit of land. That spit of land has a town filling it from the beach on the East side to the harbor on the West.

So I set off straight after breakfast and made for the summit, by means of the very well kept footpaths, along with everyone else in the vicinity. The people making the way up were generally split into two very distinct groups. The one sort were people dressed in vests, lycra and trainers of varying luminous shades, who were intent on skipping every other step and in doing so overtook me. The other group was a mix of old men who reckoned they still had the fitness, and fat people who never did have it. I overtook these people. At the top (761 ft), the survivors are rewarded with magnificent views of the beach, Mount Maunganui town and Tauranga, and the busy looking ocean.

The beach in the first picture is where I later went surfing. On my decent, and after rehydrating, I set off for the beach and hired a huge surfboard and a tiny wetsuit. My thinking was the bigger the surfboard the less I will fall off. That is not the case, it means that there is more area being pushed by the power of the sea so you fall off more. The girl working at the hire place obviously underestimated the frame I have developed from milking cows, and gave me a wetsuit that could not have been tighter without cutting off circulation. Maybe she just wanted to see my definition though, I don't know.

Obviously the ocean is a non camera zone so I have no photos of the many times I was doing this:

Instead here is a photo of me doing the classic pose to prove I was actually there:

Actually after I had taken back the gear, I went in the sea in just my shorts with my camera in its waterproof pouch. It takes a good photo through it about 10% of the time. You have to use shotgun tactics and take a load of photos, hoping one or two will be in focus. I didn't take enough to get that photo.

However here is a cool picture that I took once back on dry land:

When I left Mount Maunganui, I headed south towards Rotorua. I drove through a town called Te Puke which means 'The Hill', apparently it is not pronounced in a vomitty fashion. Still my immature self found the name quite funny. Especially in the context of shop signs. 'Te Puke Liquor Store' was a personal favourite, they should have warnings like that on the alcohol shops in the UK too. Te Puke is also the main kiwifruit growing region of NZ, for those of you who are wondering, they grow on a vine like a big hairy grape.

At Rotorua, the volcanic and geothermal capital of the country, there was a distinct odour of sulphur hanging around and a massive lake with an island in it. More on that in the next post, but it was my least favourite place so far.

See you later then.

35. The Road to Hobbiton - Day 7

On Day 7, the halfway point of my fortnight long trip, the journey's purpose was reached and 

became

Day 7 

The day in numbers:

135 km driven.

Serious geek-outs: 1

44 hobbit holes seen.

44 hobbit holes photographed.

Beers drunk in The Green Dragon, Hobbiton: 1

2nd play of The Lord of the Rings Soundtrack.

Map of Day 7's short drive:

K - Taupo. L - Hobbiton, Matamata. M - Tauranga. N (hidden behind M) - Mount Maunganui.

Well, thinking I had planned everything down to the last finite detail, I set off from Taupo with plenty of time to get to Hobbiton near Matamata, about an hour and 45 minutes North. My tour of the film set was booked at 11:30, surely I could not miss that. What I hadn't thought about was where the place actually was related to Matamata. I got to the township, found the information place and went inside to get directions. 

There was huge queue and I thought it'd probably be easier for me to find it myself. I drove around for a bit with no luck, and then tried the other direction, again with no success. With 5 minutes before my tour was due to start I went back to the info building, where the queue had subsided, to be told it was 20 minutes away. 

Apparently the whole booking time is very relaxed because they just put me on the next tour. Panic over. 

The tour starts from a café called The Shire's Rest, where they also have a 'sheep experience' which is either for townie's to learn about farming or for the Welsh. Anyway we (a group of about 25, mostly Chinese) hopped onto a bus with the most comfortable bus seats I have ever sat on, and a short drive later were dropped off at the site. 

The farm on which Hobbiton is built was originally scouted by helicopter by Peter Jackson's location scouts before the owners heard a knock on the door, and I imagine the jangle of money bags. On its 500 hectares (1250 acres) they rear mutton and Angus beef, with about 13,000 and 300 head of stock respectively. 

Like most of the North Island I have seen, the pasture was all very brown, except one small corner which apparently gets some serious overnight irrigation (think Augusta golf course). 

The person who best describes The Shire and Hobbiton was JRR Tolkien, so I will use this convenient cop-out to just post a selection of my favourite photos of the tour with a few captions. I took loads of photos, and deleted quite a few of them because there always seemed to be a Chinese in them somewhere, poking their head around a tree or something. The sunlight was very bright when we went round (at midday), so that affected my amateur snapping too. Here they are anyway:

 First view of Hobbiton Hill

Bag End (Bilbo and Frodo's home)

A Hobbit stable

 The Lake and the pub and mill in distance.

Yours truly representing in front of the famous Bag End!

 Samwise Gamgee's home

This bit of fence is famous for Bilbo Baggins (played my Martin Freeman) leaping over it as he runs after the dwarves in the first Hobbit movie. 

Not usually one for taking pictures of my beer, here is the one I had in The Green Dragon, I was disappointed it was not served in a pewter tankard. It was called the Girdley Fine Grain, and was actually rather nice. 

The Mill

The Mill and the famous bridge from across the lake.

 Definitely one of my favorite pubs I have been to in NZ, and I have been to a few. 

 The bar in The Green Dragon.

My photos do not justify the exquisite detail, craftsmanship and hard work put into the set, it is truly amazing. All the materials are genuine, i.e. the door hinges actually are cast iron, the wood is all wood. The plants are also all real, they had to remove all the native NZ ones and put English varieties in, to get it accurate to the books. In fact Jackson's attention to detail was at such a level, that the lengths they went to get the result he wanted were borderline madness. Tolkien describes a plum tree in the novel, this didn't work out well because plum trees grow to big to be scale to a hobbit. So they planted dwarf varieties of apple and pear, picked all the leaves and fruit off and glued on the plum replacements. 

Although I said all the plants are real, the Oak tree on top of Bag End is in fact made of rubber, plastic, fibreglass, etc. Originally they found an Oak tree they like the look of a few miles away, bought it, chopped it into many pieces, labelled them, and put the dead tree back together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. They then wired hundreds of thousands of plastic oak leaves onto the branches. This obviously wouldn't last, so it was replaced by the fake version.

It was a pretty awesome day, which would have normally been ruined by the concrete pillar reversing into my car earlier on in the day:

Especially annoying because I had smirked at the paint from other cars in the car park in Wellington. 

After my visit to Hobbiton, I drove around the surrounding countryside a bit, before heading up to Tauranga to find a hostel. The area is a big thoroughbred breeding part of the country (they do love their racing here) and on some of the streets the wealth was very apparent. 

At Tauranga, their was no room in the inn. Or in any other places in the town. So I headed over the estuary to Mount Maunginui, a small beach town situated below a single mountain (which I climbed the subsequent day). 

I had had far too much excitement for one day, so I found the nearest Irish pub, had some grub and a few pints and went to bed in a room that was so stifling, it could have been used to bake bread.

I'll report some more of my journey soon.