Hobbiton: A 31 year old's dream comes true
Wednesday, 3 February
The day for visiting Hobbiton had arrived. I picked up my little Ford Puma at 9am sharp and sped down State Highway 1. To say I was excited was an understatement. To get a little closer to the truth, you could say I was in NZ because of The Lord of the Rings films. I’ve watched them religiously and would fancy my chances at a LOTR pub quiz. In fact, I’d say a month hasn’t gone by in the last 15 years where I haven’t watched one of them. I just don’t get bored and I’m not sure why.
The amazing thing about Hobbiton is that it’s a live movie set built into a farm, so once you come off the motorway it’s a really idyllic drive winding through green pastures and rolling hills. I parked up and made my way over to the front office, where they told me I had an hour wait until my tour started. I think this was the first time I’d been early to anything. The tour itself is ninety minutes long and it takes a 15-minute bus ride to get to the set. Once my group was on the bus and the tour guide swiftly declared it was a ‘nerd-friendly’ zone, I couldn’t help but get a little emotional as the soundtrack began to play and she started to share a couple of stories about the set and how it came to be.
With a fantasy novel or film I find it’s sometimes good not to get behind the scenes in case it crushes the world you’ve created in your mind. But I have to say, as I stepped off the bus and took in the surroundings, it exceeded my already embarrassingly high expectations. The attention to detail was incredible, from the 30+ hobbit holes (homes) all with gardens and hobbit-sized scale props. In one of them, this included an entire newspaper called ‘The Shire Reckoning’ which had 7 pages of local news articles from this imaginary hobbit community.
Twenty years after the first film was made, they continue to maintain and re-build parts of the set, employing nearly 300 people, from gardeners and landscapers to bar staff in a functioning pub used in the film called The Green Dragon. So it really has become a world of its own and they know how much it means to the 3,000+ daily tourists who walk through the grounds.
On our walk around the hobbit houses, our tour guide stopped and asked whether anyone hadn’t seen the films. One lady put her hand up and slowly lowered her hand following the eye-rolling and tutting from the rest of us. I mean, why come if you’ve not seen the films, really?
The awkward thing about travelling alone is that you sometimes have to bite the bullet and ask people to take a photo of you. And sometimes you also have to ask if they can take a photo of you whilst you pretend to be a little hobbit writing a letter.
Towards the end of the tour I edged my way to the front of the crowd and thought I’d strike up a conversation with the tour guide. We discussed our favourite scenes in the films but I was disappointed to learn that she was unaware of the new film Hunt for Gollum which is being filmed later this year - amateur hour! Then, after a complimentary half-pint of ale from The Green Dragon, I was back on the bus which, naturally, dropped us at the gift shop. Managing to resist most of the merchandise (other than a small keyring), I returned to my car a little dazed but with a wry smile on my face that I wore all the way back to Auckland.