Around New Zealand: Hobbiton

The Mount towards the East Cape - aka Hobbiton!

Day of trip = 34

Friday 1st February 2013

We take a wee detour out of Tauranga, heading for an inland town called Matamata - aka Hobbiton. A deviation from our coastal route but worth it for an insiders view of the making of the Lord of the Rings, and more recently of course, The Hobbit.

The story goes, that back in 1998, Peter Jackson was searching New Zealand for a landscape of rolling hills, with a large symmetrical tree placed next to a lake - the description given by Tolkein for Hobbiton. They found it when flying over a sheep farm in Matamata, on Peter Jacksons birthday! It was the 3rd to last of a 100 sets they needed to find, so he was pretty happy. Came with the added convenience of no power lines, buildings etc that would need to be edited out.

For $75 (each) you can join the tour (compulsory, no wandering around on your own), and hear the stories of how crazy movie-making can be. For a cheaper short cut, keep reading.

For instance -

- the big oak tree that sits over Bag End (Bilbo's house), was found a fair distance from the set, so each branch was numbered, then chopped off, the tree itself chopped down, then transported above Bilbo's house, and all the branches re-assembled. The artificial leaves were ordered in from Taiwan, and individually wired back onto the dead tree.

- over 8 months of planning, designing, and building of Hobbiton, for a grand total of 10 minutes that made it into the film.

- the NZ army was contracted to build the road into the sheep farm (obviously nothing better to do), and change a swamp into the party field (where they filmed Bilbo's leaving do and the fireworks) - all at the cost of the taxpayer (I think we have made enough money from the movies to call it even)

- they were going to destroy the mostly-polystyrene set, but had it rebuilt with wood and full real life detail to allow tourists to continue to enjoy the set, and make a bit of cash for the farm owners. You can even have a themed wedding here!

So its expensive for the tour, but was pretty awesome seeing it all close up, especially after just watching the movie. Crazy the amount of detail just for a few minutes of film, but apparently Peter Jackson is a perfectionist. Not that we could really tell in the movie, but there you go!

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