Journal day 73 - Hobbiton....!

---

Breakfast with Nigel, Jill & Sally and then said my farewell to headed off to the town of Matamata, or as it is otherwise known.... 'Hobbiton!'

I hadn't been particularly interested in visiting Hobbiton as I'd heard that after the Lord of the Rings trilogy was realeased the set had been stripped of all detail apart form the hobbit holes themselves which were each left with just a plain white front facade. But as The Hobbit movie is currently being filmed and I was in Rotorua and not far from Matamata I phoned up just to see what was happening. I found out that the sets were fully dressed and ready for filming to take place. Apparently the Hobbiton scenes should have already been filmed but were rescheduled as Peter Jackson fell ill. Good luck for me though. So I decided to get myself to Hobbiton pronto.

As I spent most of my teenage years hacking my way through the writings of old Tolkien I found myself getting a tad ecited as I drove to Matamata. When I remembered I had the sountrack form the Lord of the Rings on my iphone I pumped it onto the car stereo. Does this make me a bit of a saddo geek? .....probably.

Apart from being the location for Hobbiton, Matamata is famous for it's horse racing. If you're looking a fine stallion or racehorse Matamata is apparently the place to get it. It's also a pretty humble and pleasant little town which suits the fact that the peaceful little Middle-Earth Hobbit settlement lies in it's outskirts.

I checked in with the Tourist info centre to pick up my ticket. I was asked to sign a confidentiality clause fordidding me to upload any photographs online. I was told a girl uploaded some pics on her facebook, was caught, had her facebook shut down immediately and subsequently brought to court.....! Not sure if I believed it though. Maybe just a scare story they've been told to tell people to stop them uploading lots of pics... but you never know!

I was eventually brought off to Hobbiton in a small bus. Along the journey the tour guide explained about the family who own the land on which Hobbiton was built, how the locaton was spotted and other interesting facts about the place and a few stories of Lord of the Rings obsessived uber-geeks who arrive on the tours fully dressed up in their Middle-Earth Costumes and tend to refuse to leave at the end of the day. One +6 foot Hobbit wannabe in paticular refused to leave on the grounds that he had a very important mission to complete or something....!?

The Hobbiton set was as promised fully dressed and ready for filming with every little detail in place. Apart from the fact that I was stubling along the tour with a group of tourists it was basically like walking into Middle-Earth. I spent a lot of my youth reading the books about Middle-Earth So, strange as it may seem, I've always in a way (& in my head) considered Hobbiton to be a real place. And with the level of detail put into every single inch of the set and location it pretty much is a real place.

The Hobbit holes are superbly constructed and exactly as they should be. Each one unique in its character and colour scheme. And each unique in it's design, frontage and garden. The gate of each has a different letter box too, some with little paintings obviouly done by the hole's proud resident Hobbit to make their letter box a bit more pleasant.

The tour leads through the village and winds up along quaint stone steps up to the Hobbit-hole with the best view of them all, owned of course by mr Bilbo Baggins. The view is amazing and pretty remarkably is vacant of any man-made, 20th century power-lines, building or stuctures (apart from a very distant barn that was temporarily turned into a tree). So it's pretty obvious why the site was so appealing to Peter Jackson. It was a great day too with the sun splitting through the tress. Above Bilbo's Hobbit-hole is a very impressive great oak tree which dominated the highest point of Hobbiton. It turns out it's completely fake and made by the wizards of Weta. A real Oak tree was used and was painstakingly recreated here and each individual leaf was tied on by Wellington students...! But the effect is worth it. But after the Lord of the Rings was wrapped it was removed and destroyed. But now that the Hobbit is to be made, it had to be constructed all over again...... jeesus.

I was constantly amazed at the level of detail given to even the smallest features, many which will never feature on screen. But the fact they are there gives the whole place a feeling of authenticity and most surely give the hobbit actors a sense of reality that must surely permeate through to their acting.
The fences are covered in very real looking moss and lichen. This effect is apparently created by painting little dabs of yogurt, which go off and develop bacterial growth to look exactly like naturally growing moss. And even better than that, all of the gardens are 100% real, containing real fruit and veg, even prize-sized pumpkins and carrots etc. All grown there in situ.

At the bottom of Hobbiton beside the lake is Bilbo's massive party tree. This tree is a real one though and the site was originally spotted as an ideal location for Bilbo's birthday party. And the huge tree's proximity to a small flat party area and a lake caght the attention of location scouts from a helicopter. But once Peter Jackson and the production team visited the place and it became evident that the location was perfect for Hobbiton in its entirety. And it makes it all the better to visit as it's all there to see plain as day. So to all extants Hobibiton is basically a real place right down to the worms in the apples on the trees! And apparently there are plans to turn the Green Dragon tavern into a real pub after filming of The Hobbit wraps.

When I found it a little difficult to leave I realised that maybe the level of my geekery was greater than I'd previously awknowledged which is a bit worrying but I eventually dragged myself back to Rotorua and back to the Waikite thermal camp-park to round the day off with a bit of bathing in the thermal hot waters of Mordor..... New Zealand, I mean New Zealand.

---