We got up at 8 am and had bagels with egg for breakfast. After breakfast and packing up, we drove off to the Redwoods, a redwood forest in Rotorua where we went on a short hike. Both the trees and ferns felt huge compared to what we’re used to.
As time was ticking on, we went back to the car, where we ordered two pizzas from a nearby Domino’s. We drove to the pizzeria and picked up our pizzas which we ate in the car. Linnea ordered a Beef and Caramelised Onion Pizza, and Gustav ordered a Hawaii pizza. In hindsight, Linnea would have gotten rid of the caramelised onion as the sweet tasted weird on the pizza.
When we had eaten, we drove off to our afternoon activity, a guided tour through Hobbiton, the movie set where they filmed parts of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogy. We arrived a quarter before our “check-in” time at the Shire’s Rest and got our tickets and brochures. From the time we had eaten our pizza until we got to Hobbiton, it had started raining.
The tour started at 1:30 pm with a bus ride onto the farm where the set was built. During the ride, our tour guide told some stories about the farm and how it came to be the film location of the two Tolkien/Jackson movie trilogies.
We got off the bus when we arrived at the set. The set for filming the Shire where the Hobbits live was built into the hills on the farm. The set was deconstructed after the original LotR trilogy and then rebuilt for the Hobbit. The second time they built it with the Hobbiton tour in mind, so they used materials that could last for a longer time.
The walking tour took us around the whole set. The different hobbit holes are at different scales depending on the perspective they were filmed from. It’s fascinating how small the hobbits are actually supposed to be, and a human would probably have to crawl to get into a real-size hobbit hole.
Anyway, the tour guide was a really nice woman from New Zealand. She helped us take some pictures, so we got some pictures of the two of us without having to take a selfie. The props and attention to detail on the set was amazing, and the tour was still nice even though it rained throughout the whole tour. The main irritation of the rain was that people kept unknowingly poking you with their umbrellas, which was both annoying and made you wet.
The tour finished off in The Green Dragon, which is a pub in the film and movies that have been reconstructed for the tourists. At the pub, we got cider and huddled up around the open fire. While sitting at the fire, we got some unexpected company from some Asian tourists that first posed in front of the fire for pictures. Then one of them, a man in probably his fifties or sixties, sat down without any warning on the armrest of the chair Linnea was sitting in and put his arm on her shoulder and then had his friend take a picture of them.
That unexpected event then prompted a discussion with four other persons we just met who turned out also to be studying in Sydney. They were all international students as well, from Norway, Germany, the US, and the UK. We talked to them for quite some time both at the pub and at the Shire’s Rest, after going back with the bus. We exchanged contact information, so hopefully we’ll meet up in Sydney.
We headed off in our van to our sleeping place of the night, a freedom camp site called Keeley Reserve. We got there, only after driven past it twice. First, because we didn’t think the exit would come that soon (don’t trust google maps completely). The second time, because all the oncoming traffic made it dangerous to cross and exit on the opposite side.
We parked, made dinner of the food we had left and then we watched Now You See Me 2. When it was finished, it was dark out, and because of that and the rain, we stayed in the van for the rest of the evening.
/ G&L
