Hobbiton

The Polar Express (again, name still undecided) has a distinct advantage over dear Kevin. The bed is essentially the entirety of the back of the van so no risky edge to fall off or low ceiling to headbutt, providing a much improved sleep experience. Amelia had a relatively significant cold yesterday so didn’t have the best night, but in typical Amelia fashion has seemed to have got over it already. The kitchen for breakfast this morning was a hive of activity, mostly people leaving free food because it’s The end of their trips. Absolutely brilliant for us, we picked up a whole load of goodies. We’re basically not going to need to pay for breakfast for a while and even nabbed some beer. 

We’d booked Hobbiton, in Matamata, for 1:30 to leave plenty of time for the journey as we’d been told maps give an eta much quicker than can actually be achieved (especially with the ever watchful Amelia checking the speedometer consistently). However, after driving through some stunning scenery and many many sheep, we arrived a couple of hours early and, after a leisurely lunch in the sun which was beaming down (suncream definitely required) we managed to get on a slightly earlier tour. This was excellent as we got a tour guide who looked and acted slightly similar to Mr Bean, in that he was an English man who gesticulated a lot with his arms and was pretty funny. More than that he had loads of trivia and shepherded us expertly though Hobbiton (no mean feat with everyone trying to get a million photos of the same thing).

To explain the experience a bit; Hobbiton is the movie set from The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit films which has been maintained for us, the eager tourist, to visit. You park in a car park about 15 minutes away and, as a group of around 15-20, get a bus to the village itself. You’re then kept within the group and guided round by an expert guide. I’d imagined you’d get dropped off and then left to your own devices to roam free, but this way everyone actually gets equal time to see everything and Bag End (Bilbo Baggins’ house, basically the main hobbit hole of Hobbiton) isn’t completely overrun by amateur photographers the entire time. You also get a free drink at the end (ginger/alcoholic beer) at the end in the Green Dragon pub.

The scenery is absolutely stunning, even Amelia enjoyed it thoroughly, despite ‘not being bothered’ by the films (code for she doesn’t like them), and the titbits of trivia we learnt from Paul (tour guide) were super interesting. Like in the scene where Gandalf is talking to Frodo on a cart at the beginning of the film, they actually put Frodo 3 feet behind Gandalf to make him appear smaller and more hobbit-like. Also they have different sized hobbit holes for the human and hobbit actors; big ones for the hobbits so they look normal and small for the humans so they look tiny. They even brought in sheep for the films as the 30,000 on the farm where it’s set weren’t ‘just right.’ There was tiny chess sets, food, ladders, beer/wine bottles for the village drunk. It really did bring the Shire to life as I’ve imagined it when seeing the films and reading the books. 

People had complained to me before about the price, however I think it’s actually pretty good value for money. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone, and a beautiful way to spend an early afternoon. After this we headed off to Rotorua and the Blue Lake campsite, where we were planning another very exciting activity for tomorrow.