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.