The first ten hours of the day yesterday were fun but less exciting than the evening. First, I woke up early and headed out of Auckland as fast as the two hamsters that power the Suzuki’s engine would take me. After a few errands I hiked up to a lookout in the Hakarimata Scenic Reserve that claims to have 1500 stairs, but I’m pretty sure they counted both up and down. Finally, to kill a couple of hours I visited the Hamilton Gardens and was surprised by how nice it is; they’ve created themed gardens such as “English Garden”, “Italian Renaissance Garden”, “Egyptian Garden”, etc that were all very different and fun to walk around. And then it was time to go to Hobbiton…
Hobbiton is literally the most touristy thing you can do in New Zealand. Supposedly 300,000 people each year take a tour through the place, but I gotta say, it’s incredibly well done. The artists who created this permanent film set absolutely went all out, and every little detail is like being inside of an art installation. The wooden frames of the Hobbit hole doors are pegged together as if built before modern tools, the firewood is cut in Hobbit-sized pieces, there are intricate carvings on most of the wooden beams, the thresholds under the doors are worn as if from years of use, and in one of the Hobbit holes that you can walk through they’ve even marked up one of the beams with the heights of the Hobbit children as they grew each year, just like we did when we were kids. There literally must have been tens of thousands of hours that went into creating this place, and you can’t help but be impressed by how they obsessed over the details, and how well they pulled off creating a living, breathing Hobbit village on a working sheep farm.
Four times a week they offer an evening banquet tour with a “feast fit for a Hobbit”, and after three weeks of often forgetting about lunch or dinner, I didn’t realize how much food I was prepared to pack away. At dinnertime they pulled back the curtains at the Green Dragon’s dining room to unveil tables completely covered in beef stew, roast chicken, legs of lamb, salmon, sausages, roasted vegetables, etc, and by my fourth helping an old lady at the table looked at me, laughed heartily, and said “that’s how it should be done”. Following dinner and an equally impressive dessert spread they handed everyone a lantern, and we set off in the dark back through Hobbiton with the Milky Way blazing overhead and Hobbit holes lit as if evening fires were burning inside. Again, it was as touristy a thing as you can possibly do in New Zealand, and I loved every minute of it.
Wow!!!!!!