![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Auckland-Hobbiton-Taumaranui
We checked out of our overnight stop this morning to get on the road south. In complete contrast to the previous motel, Grange Lodge in Manukau was brilliant. Very quiet - no traffic or insect noise - very warm welcome, friendly hosts, free wifi(!), complementary home-baked muffins on arrival, ground floor accommodation with parking right outside the door, the list goes on and on. It's a professionally-run operation but not a faceless corporate or chain, if that makes sense.
We stopped en route at a farm near Matamata which was the scene for filming of most of the Hobbiton scenes in the Lord of the Rings films. As it turned out we were particularly fortunate: while the sets were mostly destroyed after the LOTR filming, the crew are back on site at the moment and are rebuilding it all in preparation for The Hobbit, which starts filming later this year. So after the bus took us down the scary gravel farm road, rather than the guides saying "this is the landscape they used, that red post over there is where they had feature Y" we got to actually see Hobbiton itself, right down to the artificially-aged fences. Our guide Benji was full of tales of what he described as LOTR fanatics - including one tourist who spent $$$ on a replica Ring of Power, then $$$$ chartering a helicopter to fly him right over the Mount Doom location and cast the ring into the mountain! (*shakes head*) Unfortunately because of the work ongoing we had to sign our lives away regarding the photos we took, but without it we wouldn't have been allowed in at all.
Edit: Other people are braver than I regarding photos of the set! (Or maybe they relaxed the restrictions after we visited? Who knows...)
Then onwards to Taumaranui via a lunch stop. We passed *even* *more* roadworks on the way - many of which had to have been fixing up the aftermath of the heavy rain and flooding the other day. What amazes me more is the number of roadwork crews that were out there and wondering what they do in the rest of their work time.
We checked out of our overnight stop this morning to get on the road south. In complete contrast to the previous motel, Grange Lodge in Manukau was brilliant. Very quiet - no traffic or insect noise - very warm welcome, friendly hosts, free wifi(!), complementary home-baked muffins on arrival, ground floor accommodation with parking right outside the door, the list goes on and on. It's a professionally-run operation but not a faceless corporate or chain, if that makes sense.
We stopped en route at a farm near Matamata which was the scene for filming of most of the Hobbiton scenes in the Lord of the Rings films. As it turned out we were particularly fortunate: while the sets were mostly destroyed after the LOTR filming, the crew are back on site at the moment and are rebuilding it all in preparation for The Hobbit, which starts filming later this year. So after the bus took us down the scary gravel farm road, rather than the guides saying "this is the landscape they used, that red post over there is where they had feature Y" we got to actually see Hobbiton itself, right down to the artificially-aged fences. Our guide Benji was full of tales of what he described as LOTR fanatics - including one tourist who spent $$$ on a replica Ring of Power, then $$$$ chartering a helicopter to fly him right over the Mount Doom location and cast the ring into the mountain! (*shakes head*) Unfortunately because of the work ongoing we had to sign our lives away regarding the photos we took, but without it we wouldn't have been allowed in at all.
Edit: Other people are braver than I regarding photos of the set! (Or maybe they relaxed the restrictions after we visited? Who knows...)
Then onwards to Taumaranui via a lunch stop. We passed *even* *more* roadworks on the way - many of which had to have been fixing up the aftermath of the heavy rain and flooding the other day. What amazes me more is the number of roadwork crews that were out there and wondering what they do in the rest of their work time.
There are no comments on this entry.