There and Back Again - A Hobbit Lovers Tale, Part 2

Kia Ora! We started today with a plane ride back to Auckland. Weather was great, so very few bumps. Once In Auckland, our challenge was to get to the Sudima Airport Hotel to begin our adventures. This proved to be a bit tricky as a well-meaning cab driver recommended we take the airport hotel bus instead of the taxi. This entailed a 40 minute wait and a painful moment of suitcase wrangling to get everything on the bus, but we made it.

At 5:30 we met up with our Hobbit travel family. There are 38 of us, all ages, and while we may be two of the oldest members we are not alone. And we let the nerding begin! Everyone is a Hobbit lover! Everyone can debate with great energy all elements of Middle Earth, and as we get to know each other, our love of and obsession with JRR Tolkien and Peter Jackson is evident. We come from all over the world, and America is strongly represented.

Red Carpet Tours was first established by the James family in 2002. Raewyn and Vic James were teachers, and they saw the opportunity as Peter Jackson began filming in NZ. They wanted a change and decided to develop a tour company based on the LOTR movie sites. It wasn’t easy. They began by reaching out to theonering.net, a fan site devoted to all things Tolkien. It turned out that one of the founders was chosen by the Jackson crew to be a hobbit, and Julie, our intrepid guide, and daughter of the James’ befriended her and started to make in roads to people involved in the plan for the movie. Julie and her daughter actually tried to get a gig as extras in the movie, but they were too tall for hobbits (5’3”). But their enthusiasm and focus for the project allowed them to make connections.

Our first stop next day was to Hobbiton, and I was very excited to be going there. NZ was pretty strict with the LOTR crew and Jackson, and the contract allowing them to shoot the movies required that they return all landscapes to the original after the film shoot. Jackson was familiar with the many landscapes in NZ and used helicopters and advance people to fly around and visualize possible sites for the various scenes. NZ became somewhat used to the red helicopters flying around. For Hobbiton, they were looking for farmland with rolling hills and hopefully a small lake and a large tree to serve as the party tree. So in 1998, they spotted the Alexander farm. This is a 1200 acre farm with rolling hills, and a large pine tree that could have been grown for the express purpose of casting as the Party Tree. When they came to the Alexander door, to pitch the idea for the movie, Farmer Alexander sent them away as he was watching the All-Blacks rugby game, a near-religion in NZ. But the crew came back and the rest is history. The film crew for LOTR, which seems to have had an unlimited budget, built the lake and the roads for entry for all the large equipment. One interesting fact was that Peter Jackson went to the Prime Minister of NZ to ask for some funds to build the roads. She said there was no money in the budget, but she could deploy the NZ Army to help with the building. She told Jackson the army wasn’t doing anything anyway. The owner of the farm was encouraged by Jackson and crew to leave the hobbit set as it was, so it is the only set that remains as it was for filming. In fact, it grew when the Unexpected Adventure came out. The Alexander’s have a lock on the tours and I suspect they have become quite well off.

Hobbiton has over 40 hobbit holes built into the hills. It was much larger than I expected, and the attention to detail would put Disney to shame. I, as usual, teared up as we made our way into Hobbiton. I knew from the movie that Jackson had captured my fantasy world accurately, but the scale of it was much larger than I had thought. We had a hilarious guide named Sonny, who was a super fan, and had a large leg tattoo of Gollum, and plans to add much more. Sonny was a big guy and had lots of open tattoo room. Our group of Hobbit geeks was in heaven. I probably have 100 pictures of hobbit holes, and each one is different than the last. The field for Bilbo’s 111th birthday party is simply perfect, and the Party Tree, which is completely natural, could have been grown for this purpose alone. I could go on and on about Hobbiton, but I won’t, other than to say that if you are a Tolkien fan and you can swing it, you should absolutely go see Hobbiton.

I don’t think my mom was an avid Hobbit fan. But if she had been, I think she would have liked Sam best. Sam was fiercely loyal, kind but took no crap, and kept Frodo going through his worst challenges. So if you get to Hobbiton, say hi to mom. She’s visiting Sam’s hobbit hole.

A wooded path leads you to the Green Dragon, home of the best beer in the South Farthing. I had a stout and Bob had a cider, and we drank to the health of all Hobbit lovers. Sonny told us that during filming, there was a lot of beer consumed, and since Jackson wanted all his actors to be focused on the script, they brewed beer for the specific purpose of quenching thirst and maintaining wit. It was 1% alcohol and they called it Sobering Thought brew. Then we carried our beer into the large covered party room for a second breakfast. Or was it elevenses? At that point who could tell.

As we sadly left Hobbiton, (Bob and I would gladly have moved into the least hole and remained there for the rest of our days), Julie and Chris, our driver, provided us with lots of NZ facts. NZ is of course, famous for having no predatory species other than man. There are some pests, though. One is the possum. They are plentiful, and having no natural predators, can be problematic, especially for the power companies. They tend to climb the power poles and short out the generators, so all the poles have sheets of metal attached about halfway up, that the possums can’t climb to get to the top where they can do the damage. And I didn’t know that the WETA workshop is named after a rather large grasshopper with sticky feet that can jump on you and get stuck on your clothing. My worst nightmare. But they are rare and I am assured we probably won’t encounter one.

NZ is the birth place of bungee jumping. In fact, not only do they have many places to practice this skill, they will allow you to jump off almost anything, and in fact, encourage it. “Fly, you fools” is quintessential NZ. NZ is also known as the ‘shaky isles’ and have over 50 dormant volcanoes. Everyone keeps an app on their phone letting them know how much volcanic activity is present so they can get out if needed. One thing I had never seen before is deer farms. NZ has many and we were told that hunters actually use helicopters to capture deer in the wild to add to their farms. Deer meat is eaten and the horns are ground into a power and sold in China as an aphrodisiac.

That evening, we went to a cultural dinner in Rotorua. The Mitai people, a Māori tribe, provide this nightly dinner, and it was really terrific. Bob and I had been to a luau in Hawaii, and it was very entertaining, but this was really different. The Māori ceremony was meant to teach us about their culture, and we were warned several times that joking or poking fun at the ceremony would be the end of it. One of our group was selected to be the ‘new chief’ and he was part of a ritual showing how a tribe handles newcomers. He did a great job and gave a nice speech during the ceremony thanking them for welcoming us. The food was cooked in the ground, similar to a luau, and was good especially when you consider they feed over 200 people a night. We ended the evening with a moonlit walk in the tribal grounds where we saw glow worms in the bushes.

It was an excellent day to begin our Middle Earth journeys and we fell asleep instantly. Tomorrow we go to Trollshaw forest and meet the lamb farmers who ended up with the most footage in the films.