ROTORUA, NEW ZEALAND
Today while Chris did some extreme river rafting thingy, I decided to let my geek flag fly and drive to the town of Matamata, where I booked a 2 1/2 hour guided tour of the nearby "Hobbiton" location from the Lord of the Rings movies.
This is the only location in New Zealand where some of the actual set remains, as they were all supposed to be destroyed after filming. In fact, the Hobbiton set was already half-demolished when the farmers that owned the land petitioned to save the remaining set pieces. After several years of legal wrangling, they won, with the condition that they not attempt to restore anything to the way it was during filming.
So what this means is that there are a bunch of rather bare-looking hobbit holes still in place, but with no doors, chimneys, flowers, landscaping, etc. Still, it was very cool to walk around the place, which is in the middle of a sheep farm miles from the nearest town. The best part is that the entire surrounding landscape is more or less the same as it was in the films, and you could walk right through where a lot of scenes were filmed (for example, the path Gandalf rode up on with his horse and cart, the "party tree," still with a bit of birthday ribbon in it, the lake where the mill and bridge stood, and Bag End itself).
What was really amazing is that it's a completely 360-degree set: You can stand in the middle of the party field and look in all directions, and not see a single man-made structure (well, except for one shed in the distance that they camouflaged as a tree in the movie). Everything in view could be (and was) shown on screen, which made it seem a lot less "fake" than you would expect a movie set to be.
In short, it was a lot more impressive than I was expecting, and it was a really perfect sunny day to be outdoors, anyway.
Later, when I met up with Chris again, he suggested going to the nearby Paradise Valley Springs Wildlife Park, which I thought was a little bogus, since New Zealand really doesn't have any native wildlife (other than some bugs and a lizard or two, and birds). But the real attraction was that they had two four-month-old lion cubs that you could pet, and you can't do that too often. So we went there, and it turned out to be pretty fun, because we actually got to go inside the enclosure with the cub while he ran around us and bit at my shoes and stuff.
They also had some nice landscaped walks with some other random animals on display (adult lions, pigs, deer, wallabies) and a natural spring with pools of giant trout and huge eels. Kind of a weird menagerie, but whatever.
NP: Howard Shore and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, "Concerning Hobbits"
Today while Chris did some extreme river rafting thingy, I decided to let my geek flag fly and drive to the town of Matamata, where I booked a 2 1/2 hour guided tour of the nearby "Hobbiton" location from the Lord of the Rings movies.
This is the only location in New Zealand where some of the actual set remains, as they were all supposed to be destroyed after filming. In fact, the Hobbiton set was already half-demolished when the farmers that owned the land petitioned to save the remaining set pieces. After several years of legal wrangling, they won, with the condition that they not attempt to restore anything to the way it was during filming.
So what this means is that there are a bunch of rather bare-looking hobbit holes still in place, but with no doors, chimneys, flowers, landscaping, etc. Still, it was very cool to walk around the place, which is in the middle of a sheep farm miles from the nearest town. The best part is that the entire surrounding landscape is more or less the same as it was in the films, and you could walk right through where a lot of scenes were filmed (for example, the path Gandalf rode up on with his horse and cart, the "party tree," still with a bit of birthday ribbon in it, the lake where the mill and bridge stood, and Bag End itself).
What was really amazing is that it's a completely 360-degree set: You can stand in the middle of the party field and look in all directions, and not see a single man-made structure (well, except for one shed in the distance that they camouflaged as a tree in the movie). Everything in view could be (and was) shown on screen, which made it seem a lot less "fake" than you would expect a movie set to be.
In short, it was a lot more impressive than I was expecting, and it was a really perfect sunny day to be outdoors, anyway.
Later, when I met up with Chris again, he suggested going to the nearby Paradise Valley Springs Wildlife Park, which I thought was a little bogus, since New Zealand really doesn't have any native wildlife (other than some bugs and a lizard or two, and birds). But the real attraction was that they had two four-month-old lion cubs that you could pet, and you can't do that too often. So we went there, and it turned out to be pretty fun, because we actually got to go inside the enclosure with the cub while he ran around us and bit at my shoes and stuff.
They also had some nice landscaped walks with some other random animals on display (adult lions, pigs, deer, wallabies) and a natural spring with pools of giant trout and huge eels. Kind of a weird menagerie, but whatever.
NP: Howard Shore and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, "Concerning Hobbits"
posted by John Kuge at 8:42 PM
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