Anyone who has ever heard of or visited New Zealand cannot help but associate our great country with Sir Peter Jackson and the hobbits.
So now that we have arrived in Tauranga Harbour, and with White Island off the menu, Hobbiton was so close that it seemed churlish not to visit.
After a few mind numbing and depressing experiences, I have been avoiding ship-organised excursions, finding that most were geared towards the slowest common denominator.
After being jammed on to a stuffy steel tube for several hours, driven through dull countryside to disembark for a brief hour or two, only to be herded like sheep through some overrated tourist destination, before finally being stranded in an expensive and tacky souvenir outlet. (I’m intimate with tacky – my parents once specialised in quality gifts, clothing and souvenirs.) All of this while being monetarily fleeced not just by the extreme cost of the ship’s excursion but by everybody else in between.
Having said that, this particular experience was to be something quite different. Maybe it was being a tourist in my own country or maybe it was the high-quality providers we had, but Hobbiton turned out to be a world-class experience deserving of its 650,000 annual visitors. It makes me regret not having visited it sooner – this, our ‘largest ranking, international paid attraction’.
All my life I had not realised that we lived in such a Tolkenesque paradise. It’s no wonder that Peter Jackson returned to New Zealand to film his series – he found all of the elements of his Hobbiton Shire in just one farm in the Waikato. Rolling hills, a pristine lake, empty hobbit burrows and, most of all, seclusion. More location scenes and production benefits than even Jackson could use in just one film. With the help of the New Zealand Army he built what would become a New Zealand icon and propel us into world cult status.
The first set for the Lord of the Rings was dismantled after he filmed the first movie; it had taken nine months to build but mere days to dismantle. With the success of ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’, he decided to continue with the series and rebuilt the shire as a permanent film set spending two years re-creating the village and its surrounds.
This time, instead of using polystyrene and plywood, he used macrocarpa wood and steel so that the set would endure. Vinegar was used to age the wood to appear two- hundred-years-old and fruit and leaves were individually wired on to trees to make them appear in season even when they weren’t. The attention to detail is so meticulous that even the moss on the fences and gates is simulated.
All hobbits were catered for with each hobbit having their own burrow particular to that character, all done to the scale of 3ft 5in – hobbit height. Unfortunately, to my embarrassment, I discovered that the urinals in the public bathroom are also to this same scale.
On viewing Bilbo Baggins’ house, one American lady on our tour mixed up Bilbo’s name – pronouncing it with a ‘D’ instead of a ‘B’. Fortunately, I was able to convince the others in our group that she was indeed correct and that he was the little-known, elder brother of Bilbo and therefore saved a little old lady immense embarrassment.
The most amazing statistic thrown at you during the tour is that even though the site took two years to build and cost many millions of dollars, over the 24 hours of the hobbit movies it is on screen for exactly 12 minutes.
Today, 300 people still work maintaining the site. Gardeners, guides and maintenance workers keep the village in tip-top condition ready for the hobbits to move back any time they wish. But, here at the end of the tour, in the overgrowth, its entrance nearly hidden by brambles, is the souvenir shop filled with trinkets that would make even a hobbit’s eyes gleam. And there it was, in time honoured fashion, the utter ring of those fateful words: “Thank you for coming, now, please, exit via the gift shop.” That fear of being locked into a gift shop brings back such horrific childhood memories that I named my 2016 World
Cruise blog: www.exitviathegiftshop.blogspot.com
Note the unashamed self promotion here! (ROSS THORBY)