Clan Haley

Hobbiton & Sanctury Mountain

Today was the day Laura had been waiting for! We left our accomodation in Matamata and drove the 15 minutes out of town to Hobbiton. We joined our tour group being led by someone with a PhD in Tolkien litrature. I'm not sure what qualifications I would expect a tour guide at Hobbiton to require, but I think it's safe say this guy ticked the "massive fan" box. The tour was really amazing. We got an interesting history of the location scout stumbling acorss the farm, the farmer telling him to go away before his wife said hold on, lets hear this man out. Next we got guided past 42 hobbit holes with various stories about the scenes that were filmed there and some interesting anecdotes about things going wrong. The main attraction was obviously bag end, where Bilbo and Frodo lived. We also saw Sam's house and the Green Dragon pub which served us real beer. When they originally built hobbiton for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy most houses were made out of polystyrene and taken down after the filming. When they came back for the Hobbit movies they decided to build the set out of more permanent materials so it could stay on for longer. Almost all the doors are just that, doors with only enough behind a door to avoid having to do tricky CGI later (remember LOTR was filmed more than 25 years ago!). Two of the doors led through into complete hobbit houses that we got to explore, with miniture beds, tables, writing tables, bath and even toilet. It was properly cool. James had a blast trying to guess what the inhabitants of each house did based on the possesions scattered around outside.

After grabbing some lunch we made a short detour south towards Sanctuary Mountain. This is a nature reserve based on the North Island. Normally these reserves require to be on an island to keep pest outs (rats, stoats, possums etc), but Sanctuary Mountain has 47km of preditor proof fence that encloses it. Inside the forest was super impressive with some really ancient trees and vegetation making the habbitat ideal for wildlife. We saw a lot less than we did on Tiritiri, but I think that was to be expected. We did see plenty of North Island Robins and a North Island Saddleback. The highlights for me were the 5 Kaka we saw feeding and the shining cuckoo chick we saw being fed by a warbler.

After that we got back in the car for our last proper drive back to Auckland.