Shonandgraham's travel blogs:
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Another day in Rotorua
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Another day spent in and around Rotorua. We had to get up fairly early as I'd booked us on the Hobbiton Tour, a tour of the remaining part of the set used in Lord of the Rings to film Hobbiton. This is actually near a place called Matamata, about 45mins away from Rotorua. We could have driven there ourselves, but since Graham had spent most of the day before driving, I decided to pay a bit extra and get picked up, at 8am.
Hobbiton was filmed on the Alexander family farm. It was discovered during flights over the land searching for possible film locations. It was chosen due to the large tree that was perfect to be used as the Party Tree. The set was actually meant to be demolished after filming and part of it was, but then heavy rain made it impossible for the bulldozers to get to the remaining hobbit holes. They were meant to come back in 6 months time to finish, but by that time the locals from Matamata had already been asking to see the remains of the set, and the Alexanders quickly realised that they could make some money out of tours. They had to renegotiate with New Line Productions to be able to use the set, and at first you weren't able to take cameras on the tour as the 2nd and 3rd Lord of the Rings films hadn't been released.
The tour goes through the main areas of the farm that were used in filming, and at each location there are photos from the films so you can see how the set was transformed during filming. We both enjoyed the tour and would recommend it to any LOTR fans! We arrived back in Rotorua at lunchtime and had a relaxing afternoon wandering round the city and having a snooze before we headed off to the Polynesian Spa at 5pm. I'd booked us both in for massages. I had the Aix Spa Massage and Graham had the Vitalising Back Therapy. Mine was a bit different as I was covered with hot towels, and then jets of warm water were placed over me, whilst I was having the massage. It was bliss! Graham had a more traditional dry massage. Before our treatments we spent an hour in the hot pools, moving between the different temperatures. The hottest one, at 42deg was too hot for us and we only spent about 5 mins in there. There was a guy who had obviously spent quite some time in there as he was bright red and feeling a bit faint!
After the spa, we headed up to the Rotorua Gondola and Luge. We had tried to do this earlier in the afternoon but it was really busy, so we went back at twilight and there were no queues. We've been to the Queenstown Gondola & Luge, and whilst their Gondola has much better views, Rotorua's Luge was much better. They have 3 tracks, Scenic, Intermediate and Advanced. We went down once on the Scenic, and they have stopping places for photos, and then we had 2 goes on the Intermediate. The Advanced wasn't open but to be honest the intermediate was fast enough for me! Maybe next time! More thumbnails ...
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