Day 13: Te Aroha to Matamata
March 10th 2014
Distance cycled: 46 km
Total distance to date: 721 km
Today was an important milestone in my trip to New Zealand. Today, I visited Hobbiton.
Started off in Te Aroha this morning after a nice evening and morning with my WS hosts Anita and Chris. They were fantastic. WS is so great!
Te Aroha is home to the less-than-inspiring hot soda water geyser. (It is, however, the only hot water soda geyser in the world.) There is a drought on here right now, so the geyser doesn't really erupt at the moment - the lady at the i-Site said it was more like opening a bottle of champagne. It still erupts every 40 minutes but I wasn't going to stick around to watch it.
Then came a beautiful 40km ride on a quiet country road to Matamata.
Matamata is the self-proclaimed Hobbiton and a Mecca for Lord of the Rings fans. Real Hobbiton is another 12km outside of town, on a 500-hectare farm belonging to the Alexander family.
My campsite was 6km before Matamata, so I dropped my stuff there and continued on the unloaded bike into the city. I darted straight to the info center, which was LOTR-themed.
At the info site, I booked the next tour to Hobbiton.
The LOTR movies and the Hobbit were filmed here. The original set was taken down after the LOTR movies, as were all LOTR sets, but reconstructed for the Hobbit movies and left up this time so people like me can come and nerd out hardcore. I met some other Seattleites on my tour who were much nerdier Tolkien fans than me. That's the Seattle I know and love. Represent!! They also knew what I was talking about when I said I had the techno remix version of "They've taken the hobbits to Isengard!" playing on loop in my head during the entire tour.
Me peeking out of a hobbit hole:
Bag End:
There are two other Bag Ends. One was made really big so that Frodo and Sam and the other hobbits would look small. The other is in Peter Jackson's house. No lie.
The oak tree above Bag End is completely fake. I got to take home one of the leaves, which fall off all the time apparently. Looks cool though, huh?
The place isn't that big but we got to spend some time there and learn some facts. For example. they turned all the pear and apple trees into plum trees two weeks before the movie shoot because Tolkien offhandedly mentions plum trees in the book. But real plum trees are too big to be hobbit plum trees. So they took apple and pear trees, which are smaller, took off all the fruits and leaves, and replaced them with leaves imported from Taiwan.
The tour ended in the Green Dragon pub. This pub has only been open one year. You can only go there if you do the tour, and everyone gets a free drink. Yes, they had ginger beer!
Our excellent tour guide, seen here on the left, helped hand out drinks. The bartender was kind of surly and looked very Hobbit-like to me:
Back in Matamata, the pub that had stored my bike for me while I was out on the tour was also LOTR-themed.
The day ended with a dusky ride back to camp, followed by a soak in the mineral pools that belong to the campgrounds.
On another note: one sees all sorts of campervans roaming about NZ. My favorite rental company right now is Wicked because of the graffiti motiv and the slogans they come up with. One is parked across from my campsite tonight:
posted by Kyla @ 04:28
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