Playing hard in Rotorua
Trip Start
Oct 27, 2008
1
7
23
Trip End
Dec 01, 2008
Rotorua, North Island, New Zealand
Saturday, November 8, 2008
This is the spot where brave (young) people can do extreme sports, from zorbing to bungy jumping to skydiving to raftabout and sledgeabout. You name it, Rotorua 's the place to do it. I'm still working on the tandem skydive. Today would have been an excellent day to do it as the weather is very clear so you'd get good views. The bravery levels aren't that high at the moment, and youth definitely isn't on my side. Maybe next week.....
Like I've just said, it's a glorious day, bright sunshine and warm. If good weather brings out the electorate, then it should be a high turnout for today's election = apparently it tends to be in the region of 80-85%.
Just another little fascinating snippet of interest, there's huge animosity between Aucklanders and the rest of NZ, which seems to be reciprocated. So the guys at both AUT and UoA were all completely taken aback that I was spending two weeks at Waikato, and couldn't understand what I could possibly be doing there - even more difficult to comprehend was the fact that I wanted to get back for the weekend, rather than spend any more time in Auckland (although the hotel was tempting, once I'd seen it). But they really do seem to have this superior attitude, and today I was told by someone from Rotorua that they don't think that anything exists south of the Bombay Hills (rather like Londoners and north of Watford...). Apparently, it's cheaper to take a flight to Australia, eg Sydney or Melbourne, than it is to fly to the South Island which might be one reason why Aucklanders know little about their own country.
I'm checked into a backpackers place for the night, Planet Nomad Backpackers on Fenton Street. It's a million miles apart the Duxton in Adelaide, sadly. It's a case of one extreme to the other . I have gone for a single room rather than a dorm, so some would think just doing that was luxurious. There's a bed, wardrobe, chair and mirror oh, and a waste bin. So these must be considered the essentials. You can rent a towel for two dollars, and you get one back when you hand the towel back in.
This afternoon I've indulged myself in tacky touristy treats, and done the Hobbiton Movie Set and Farm tour from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's closer to Matamata than Rotorua, so I've ended up going back not quite to where I started (ie Hamilton) but not too far off! We're in the Bay of Plenty area; it's where Anchor butter comes from, and is the race horse capital of New Zealand - there are more race horses here per head of population than anywhere else in NZ. Apparently you can see around 500 race horses being exercised in the early morning.
Actually, the Hobbiton trip was fun. I've seen the Party Tree and the Party Field and the lake, I've walked up Bag Shot Row to Bag End, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins' home. I've seen lots of hobbit holes, and learned fascinating facts about how they make movies - or these movies in particular. This included cutting down an oak tree at Matamata, and transporting it to the 1250 acre Alexander farm which was one of the main film sites. Each branch was numbered and chopped, and after transportation was bolted together on top of Bag End. They imported a whole load of artificial leaves from Taiwan and then employed 30 students from Waikato University to wire the leaves individually to the dead tree. I'm not sure which is worse: wiring leaves on to trees or stuffing envelopes, which tends to be why we employ uni students. Heigh ho, at least they're earning some money to help pay off that student loan! They also got skeleton apple and pear trees and wired them up with artificial plums and leaves.
The New Zealand army was brought in to build 1.5 km of road into the site and do the initial site development. This was on a farm comprising rolling farmland without any 20th century clutter such as roads, buildings or power lines. It did have sheep though, about 7,000 of them doubling up to 14,000 once the lambs arrived. Sadly, they weren't the right sort of sheep; they weren't 'Middle Earth' enough so Peter Jackson had the right sort of sheep imported, black nosed....
Peter Jackson was neurotic about security during the preparation/building of the film set and the subsequent filming; some sort of flying veto was introduced by the authorities-and policed. Basically, if anyway was caught flying below X thousand feet, once they landed they plane was searched and if any camera or filming equipment was found then the pilot lost his/her licence - and apparently two people did lose their licence and can no longer fly. The power of international movie directors! I can remember when I was in Wellington in 2004 and he was filming King Kong just around the corner being caught taking photographs was nearly a hanging offence - and some of us managed it better than others (see photos in first travelogue)!
(am currently at the backpacker's; someone seems to have started playing drums; this is not promising; now there's fireworks. Discovered that the local Indian community are holding a Deepawali Festival today, which culminates in Drum Beats and a fireworks display on the lakefront)
Our tour guide seemed disappointed that none of us had come dressed as elves, orcs, hobbits, goblins.... Apparently, many people do. One person she vividly remembered was a 6ft 4in German guy, dressed as a hobbit, who refused to go home/away at the end of the tour saying that at long last, he'd come home!
Many locals wanted to be hobbits; the criteria were: under 5ft 4in; round, rosy face; nice smile. The youngest was four-and-a-half and the oldest was 84. It took two hours to get a hobbit made up and dressed.
I need to see the Lord of the Rings films again. This was only one location (of 178 film locations) in NZ, but it would be good to check out the films again now I've been to Hobbiton - then I can bore everyone and say 'I've been there'. What was really clever was that they did some of the filming of a particular sequence in, say, Wellington and then they sort of joined it up with a piece that they'd filmed here on the Alexander farm. So a woodland track that Bilbo was running down could have been filmed in Wellington when he first started running but filmed here for the finish of the run (or something like that - cunning edits and stuff like that).
After the tour of the Hobbiton village, we went to the Woolshed for a sheep shearing demonstration followed by bottle feeding pet lambs.
Once we were back in Rotorua, I did a quick tour of the touristy things: Government Gardens, the Bath House, some stinky pools, the Sulphur Wildlife Refuge on Lake Rotorua.
H.x
