February 12, 2011

Time to move again after some great days in Coromandel.

Back in September, before we left Norway, Adrian had made us aware that there is a hobbit motel in New Zealand, where you can stay in a hobbit hole, just like the ones the hobbits live in in the Lord of The Rings movies. The motel was close to Waitomo, where there are some very interesting glow worm caves, so we added it to our itinerary.

Adrian is a big fan of the Lord of the Rings and one of his hobbies is to play board games with his friends using miniatures (from the movies) which they assemble and paint themselves. He really wanted to visit sites in New Zealand where the movies have been made. However, when we did some net research, we found that when the Lord of The Rings film trilogy was finished all filming locations were returned to their natural state. There are places to visit, but it is often difficult to recognize them from the scenes in the movies.

What Adrian did not not know was that we had been given a super tip by the Swiss couple we had invited over for dinner the other day. The filming of the movie “The Hobbit” is just about to start, and they have rebuilt the entire “Shire,” the village of the hobbits. Not only that, you can join a guided tour of the movie set! In fact the filming was going to start in 2 days (later we discovered it was delayed) and this was the very last chance to see the set. By chance the movie set was more or less in between Coromandel and Waitomo.

We drove through a hilly landscape covered with very green grass. This seems to be very typical for the north island. There is grass everywhere and it looks almost artificially green.

After a while we asked Adrian to have a look at this sign:

The reaction was instant and energetic.

Soon we reached Hobbiton:

This area was hand-picked by Peter Jackson (the director of the LoTR movies) when he travelled around the north island in a helicopter back in 1998, to find filming locations. On the site was a very large sheep farm and he made a deal with the owners. When they started to dismantle everything after the movies were finished, a very heavy rain set in that made it impossible to move in with heavy machines. This time lag made it possible for the owners to contact and negotiate a deal with the film company. In the end they let the hobbit holes stay, stripped of everything but the concrete frames, and let the owner of the farm organize guided tours of the location. The only place in New Zealand where this was allowed.

Now that they have rebuilt everything the owners still have the right to do tours. They boast that this is the only film set location in history where you can visit the set before filming starts.

We got our tickets:

We waited for our tour bus to arrive and had a great view of some of the many sheep here:

In general we have noticed that there are many more animals per square meter of grass here in New Zealand than anywhere else we have seen, probably because of the favorable climate.

Unfortunately we had to sign this contract before taking the tour:

At least they let us take photos, but as you see I cannot show you any of the about 200 photos we took while on the movie set. Awwhhhhhhhh…

There are some photos on the web site of the tour company though, have a look here to get an impression of what it looked like.

It’s really a pity I can’t show the pictures, Dauro, because I was wearing the Brazil soccer t-shirt you gave me. On the other hand it is really tight around my steadily increasing stomach surface.

Strictly speaking, if I follow that contract by the letter, I am not allowed to tell you anything the guide told us while on the set. I have decided to take the risk of being sued, though. Anything for you, my dear readers. Here goes (closing eyes):

The movie set was incredible. Almost 40 hobbit holes had been constructed in the hilly grass-covered landscape. We were extremely serendipitous with our timing. Since filming was due to start in a few days everything was perfect and in place, right down to vegetables in the hobbit gardens and fruits on the trees. The money and man-hours that must have gone into this is simply mind-bogling. All these resources spent to create an illusion and entertain people for a couple of hours.

Our guide told us that they had had many Tolkien fans visiting, with different degrees of insanity. He said many thought they were hard-core just because they could read or speak Elvish (the language of the elves in the movies). He said that was nothing. The most extreme case was a couple who only spoke Elvish between them. To top it the woman did not speak English, so whenever the guide explained something about the movie set the guy had to translate everything into Elvish for her.

They had one visitor who by principle had not seen the movies, because he wanted to keep his images from the books in his mind. He had instead come to visit the movie set to see if Peter Jackson had a good and vivid imagination. He had taken a look around and said that yes, Peter Jackson did have a good imagination. Then he had sat down in the grass waiting for the guided tour to finish, so he could take the bus back.

Another guy had bought a gold replica of THE ring in the souvenir store here. They cost around NZD 1000 (USD 750). He told them he was going to go down to Tongariro national park, where the Mt Doom volcano scenes were filmed. He would then hire a helicopter with a pilot and proceed to drop the ring into the volcano. I have to admit the coolness factor of that is quite high.

We were shown around the set and the details were very impressive. The guide told us that Jackson was extremely detail oriented and always followed the Tolkien books in everything. For instance the books said there were six hobbit holes in the other side of the lake from the village pub. Six had been built, even though only four can be seen in the movies. When fans had complained Jackson could point out that the other two were there, just around the corner of that hill, you just couldn’t see them in the movie.

We were pretty amazed that tours were allowed at all. We were maybe 60 in our group, with one guide and two helpers, and it wouldn’t take much for someone to stumble and ruin something. The guide told us they had already been given two warnings from the film company and one more would mean they would have to shut down. On one occasion someone had stepped on a rock and killed some small plants. These were specifically grown on the rock and it took time to grow new ones. The other occasion had been surreal. Despite being told not to touch anything a group of about 100 people had gone mad. Some people had started to enter a hobbit hole and then others had followed. Kids had started to play with a hobbit swing, etc. The poor guide had not managed to stop it all.

I can imagine the despair of the guide. Human group psychology is fascinating. It seems that when we act as a group IQ often goes dramatically down, approaching that of sheep. “Oh well, if that other guy goes into that house then I must have misunderstood something, and since i really want to do it I will do it too… Baaaah”

After the movie set tour we were given a demonstration of how to shear sheep

and then we bottle-fed some lambs. Sure kid-winner:

After another hour of driving around grassy hills we reached our own hobbit hole:

At last, here is that Brazil t-shirt, Dauro:

A bunch of kids:

There was a pig on our roof!

The motel consisted of several quite original living quarters. There was a boat:

A train wagon:

And an airplane:

I bet you would have loved staying in that plane, Marius. There is a ladder going up to the cockpit, where the sleeping room is.

Eirik

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