Timo & Charlo visit Frodo & Bilbo

Timo & Charlo visit Frodo & Bilbo
Hamilton, New Zealand

Hamilton, New Zealand

Having become full blown LOTR and Hobbit fans after our marathon movie viewing and obsessive location seeking in the South, we were over the moon to now be in the perfect location to visit a real life genuine part of Middle Earth, Hobbiton!!

We had completely disregarded this on our first time going past, but this time no amount of dragons, trolls, orcs or goblins were going to come between us and a visit to Bilbo and Frodo.

We had an open mind about Hobbiton as we had met other travellers who either loved or hated it. We loved it.

The Shire is actually mainly 1,205acres of farmland containing 1300 sheep, 300 angus beef cattle and now thanks to Peter Jackson a whole load of Hobbits. When the location search for LOTR was underway the farm was located using aerial searches and after negotiations it was agreed that this once humble farmer would now house one of the most important movie locations in New Zealand. In March 1999 the NZ army commenced work to build a road to the site. The initial set was not made to last and was dismantled after the filming of the trilogy, but thankfully in 2010 the set was rebuilt for the filming of The Hobbit. Whilst there are 44 hobbit holes on view, sadly it is not possible to go in any of them as the internal scenes were all filmed at Weta studios.

We had a pretty terrible tour guide, but we didn’t really care and just stayed a few steps behind of the group of misfits that we had been placed with and took our photos once the group had moved on and out of the way. Seriously I am not kidding when I say we had a bunch of misfits; we had a pair of American honeymooners with their matching Bride & Groom Football shirts (which were needed as we couldn’t tell which was which, meow), the typical Asian with a selfie stick who had no idea what the tour guide was saying and just filmed himself for the entire 2 hour tour and unbelievably the idiot backpackers who had hit our beloved Blondini with a Frisbee a few weeks earlier, what are the chances!!

The tour concluded with a free drink in the Green Dragon Freehouse, which was awesome as you could go inside and every little detail had been though about.

As we made our way out of Hobbiton the heavens opened so after a quick coffee we were back on the road and were headed to stay with a friend that we had made at the start of our journey. We originally couch surfed with Susan and Cleo back in November and through the power of facebook had kept in touch and become great friends. Thankfully Susan was kind enough to offer us another couple of nights couchsurfing on our way through. We were welcomed by Susan who had cooked us a delicious dinner and we were welcomed like family. As Susan was out at work the majority of our stay she was kind enough to let us have free reign of the house with the beloved Cleo. The least we could do was to have dinner on the table ready for her after a tough days work, so I put my sushi skills to the test and even if I do say so myself, did a pretty fine job. As a cruise fan herself Susan enlightened us about the great things that we had to come on our cruise that we had no idea about, free lectures, art classes, gourmet dining… the list just went on and on, we had absolutely no idea how luxury cruising could be, fingers crossed our boat lives up to these expectations.

After a lovely couple of days relaxing, cooking and chatting we had to say a fond farewell to Susan and Cleo and we were off to our final destination and funnily enough our first stop when we arrived in New Zealand, Auckland with Barry & Tomomi.