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/