Hobbiton

Our trip to Hobbiton was one of our best tours, but it happened to fall on one of our worst days.

I have mentioned that often you don't really get complete information from a hotel listing. This was very much the case with our lodgings here, the Comfort Inn Gwendoline. First of all, they did have laundry, but it was only one washer and one very weak dryer. Also, the map showed it as being right on the main street of the town, and that was true, but it was a much longer walk from the center of town than we realized.

Still, we plan and leave lots of room for things to go wrong, so we arrived at Tourism Rotorua with time to spare. All of the major tours leave from here. They have an information center, gift shop, cafe with internet access, and ticket booth, as well as bathrooms, so it's really the hub of Rotorua, at least for tourists.

Danny picked us up, and he was wonderful. He was very friendly and considerate, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things related to Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings, and New Zealand, and he got into the spirit of things.

He called us all hobbits, along with anyone else who would be joining us on the tour, and he would just not call anyone crazy, even though based on the stories, we would. Sure, people show up in costume, and you kind of have to expect that, but they had one person there who only spoke Elvish, and had her husband translate everything for her (I guess he spoke both English and Elvish). I would consider that person to be weird, but Danny would not say any such thing, and you could tell he has an affection for everyone who comes.

We had one other person in our van, and then met another person at the farm, so there was a total of five in our group. Danny did not end up being our tour guide for the actual set, but we'll get back to him later.

The film set is well worth seeing. You get a lot of behind the scenes information, and they do a good job of explaining how things were done. In addition, it is the only set you can see. All of the others were dismantled. Even with this set, they cannot make the holes look like hobbit homes, meaning they can't paint them in that manner or plant flowers around them. (Being able to paint the wood white was a compromise.) One of the girls with us had been on almost every Lord of the Rings tour in New Zealand (and the two she missed overlapped with other ones she had taken), and for those, basically they are pointing at a patch of grass or a tree and saying this is where the bed was. So this is definitely more interesting.

It was raining on and off (which will be important later). They provided umbrellas, but you are climbing up some fairly steep paths, and it does get a bit slick at times. It is not terribly hard physically, but I do recommend good shoes.

After the tour, they took us to to, well, I imagine it is a sheep shed, and not the sheep shed. They do shear sheep and feed lambs in here, but it is a small room and the farm has thousands of sheep, so they probably have larger facilities somewhere else on the property.

We got a sheep shearing demonstration, and they are fast and thorough. I think they said that to make any money you need to be able to do a sheep in four minutes. As a professional shearer, you can get very strong arm muscles, but will be lopsided if you do not switch sides regularly. However, you end up with very soft hands because you are constantly absorbing lanolin out of the wool.

We knew we were going to see a shearing, and then bottle feed baby lambs, but it did not go exactly how I imagined. I thought they would hand us each a lamb, and then a bottle. Instead, they distributed the bottles and released the lambs, leading to an itty-bitty stampede. Turns out that you don't need to guide the feeding very much. They know what they are doing. Yes, one did get hung up on the second bottle, trying to wrestle it away from his brother, before we helped him find the third bottle, and I think they all kept drinking long after the bottles were empty (you know, just in case they missed something). Oh, they were adorable.

There is a cafe and gift shop. Danny got us some food, and although normally only coffee and tea are included, this was one of those times when they allowed the substitution. I got a hot chocolate, and I think my sisters got Cokes.

The gift shop is pretty expensive. You can get a beautiful elven cloak made out of beautifully soft merino wool, but it will cost you. I bought a guide book for Misty, and a thing of Lanolin based hand cream.

Danny made a side trip for us to a statue of Gollum that they have in Matamata, and we made our way back to Rotorua. (He also taught us quite a bit about about the hot springs.)

Now, Danny offered to drop us off anywhere we wanted, so we could have had him take us back to the inn, but we wanted to check the internet and get dinner, so we just had him drop us off back at Tourism Rotorua. This may have been a mistake.

As we were checking e-mail, it started to rain. Well, it had been on and off, fine, we'll hang out a little bit longer. So we browsed in the gift shop and looked at the different tours. It was raining harder. Okay, we do need to get dinner, this restaurant we wanted to go to was only two blocks away, so we would get there and eat and then maybe it would clear up.

Not only did it not clear up, we couldn't find what we were looking for. We found a grocery store type place with kind of a strip mall/food court area, so good enough, we'll eat and hope that the rain stops.

Julie and Maria wanted to play it safe, so they tried the place with American style food, and thought it was gross. I had Indian food, and it was pretty good. Playing it safe gets you nowhere. Still, it just kept raining harder.

Although we were trying to conserve money, if I had seen a cab I would have gone for it, but there were just none to be had. So, we walked about two miles back, in the rain.

We got so wet, and later on I noticed that my clothes had kind of a moldy smell, and I wonder if the sulfur in the air was an issue. Anyway, the dryer was quite weak, and we already had most of our clothes spread out all over the room to dry, so we just had to spread out our coats and shoes as best as we could.

Still, it was a lovely tour. Maybe we just should have asked Danny to hit a drive-through on the way back to the Inn. I bet he would have.



http://www.hobbitontours.com/
http://www.rotoruanz.com/

Waitomo and the road to Rotorua

We were not allowed to take pictures in the glowworm caves, so all of the photos are from the road there.

One thing that I should mention is that New Zealand is really a pretty small country. Our cab driver the first day was saying you could drive the length of the north island in eight hours, spend three on the ferry, and then he wasn't sure about the length of the south island, but others said you could drive it in eleven hours. Obviously if you were to go at this rate, you would not be seeing and enjoying things, but the point is that you can cover a lot of ground in a short time.

The reason I mention this is because there were various places that I had thought about going when I was planning the trip, but decided against because I did not think we had time. Suddenly, as we are on the tour bus I kept seeing signs for all of these places, and they weren't really that far away. It is a good reason to consider renting a car. On the north island, things are really close together, and you can hit more that way. On the south island things are further apart, but all of the scenery is really beautiful.

This particular tour was selected because it went from Auckland (where we knew we would be) to Rotorua (where many attractions are) and stopped at the Waitomo caves. Even with that, it might have been worthwhile to be on our own, because we only saw one cave, and there are three there (Waitomo, Ruakuri, and Aranui). Actually, there are multiple glowworm caves in New Zealand, though I think Waitomo is the best known.

I definitely think seeing one of the caves is in order. There's something eerily beautiful about the glowworms, like a mini-galaxy of stars. The thread of personal connection that we experienced at Waitangi continued, as our guide was the granddaughter of the Maori chief who had owned the land and discovered the caves. It's nice to have that history built in.

For this particular tour, you walk in part of the way, and see some things, and then load into a boat to ride further in. We did not get the full tour, as heavy rains had caused the water to rise about twelve feet. We later met another tourist who had to miss the boat ride completely, as the rain did not stop after we left. We still saw a fair amount.

The tour does not take very long, and our option included lunch. There is usually a cafeteria at Waitomo, but it had burned and the new construction had not been completed yet, so they took us to the Big Apple Cafe. The picture shows the sign only. The Cafe itself is a regular building, with a normal shape, and quite large. It's more like a reception hall than a cafe.

The tour option was a lunch buffet. We had our choice of meat from the grill, and then there was a table with different things you could take. There was not much variety, but the food was really good. Partly it was that there wasn't much of a selection, and partly it was that they were not doing a good job of keeping the different dishes filled, but my steak, pumpkin soup, and fried rice were all good. So, that may not sound like a glowing recommendation, but I would go again.

Other pictures include a view of Auckland taken from Kelly Tarlton's, a tree I shot from the bus because I found it very symmetrical, and two shots from the pitstop we made. The dog building has a kind of a tourist shop/information booth and the sheep is a cafe. If I remember correctly, it is the Slightly Sheepish Coffee House, and the dog is of course the Good Shepherd, for the tourists as well as the sheep.

The drive was not at all bad in terms of distance or rough road. The company was not great. We had a very nice driver from Auckland to Waitomo, who was friendly and gave good information. At Waitomo we switched drivers, and John seemed to kind of hate us. He wasn't outright rude, but there was this thinly-veiled contempt. To be fair, there were some other Americans on the bus, and at least one of them was quite overbearing and obnoxious. I can see that if you get enough of those, you could build up a distaste for it, but then maybe you don't belong in the hospitality industry.

Again, the point of all this is that you should just get a car.

http://www.waitomo.com/