Tricksy Hobbitses

What good would it be to travel across the world to the home of Middle Earth without visiting Hobbiton. The weather today doesn’t seem to be perfect but it certainly held up bester than yesterday to ensure that the trip went off without too much of an issue. It took about an hour to get there and throughout the journey the driver of the tour bus regaled us with Lord of the Rings facts and info that was pretty interesting and quite funny in a “dad joke” kind of way. It was certainly better than just looking out of the window and listening to music

Out of all of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, Hobbiton is the only movie set that is still active and still maintained as a tourist location. Many of the other places used in the movies are also scattered around New Zealand for you to visit when you want but the Shire has been preserved and maintained to keep it in tip top shape for the tourism industry. When it was first built back in 1999 all of the hobbit holes were made as temporary structures to just last for while the movies were made, however in 2009 the site got a full makeover for the filming of the Hobbit movies and this time the structures have been made permanent to last at least 50 years on the site. It took nearly 2 years for them to build the site for just 12 days of filming which is a pretty impressive amount of work but at least it is still being used every day.

One of the most impressive things is the oak tree above Bilbo and Frodo’s house. In the Lord of the Rings Trilogy the Oak tree was actually a real tree that had been found a few miles away in the town of Matamata, cut down and then reassembled on location in the new site. The leaves were then made artificially and wired on one by one to make the tree. For the Hobbit movies the tree had to be replaced since they are set 60 years before the Lord of the Rings movies. This means that they needed a smaller tree for this and they also needed something that would last a lot longer than that. For this reason they actually made smaller replica of the original tree out of steel and silicone to look exactly like a younger version of the original. The attention to detail goes so deep that Peter Jackson was actually unhappy with the colour of the leaves on the new fake tree and so got someone to repaint all the leaves one by one to get them to the new shade that they needed in the movie!

We finished off the tour in the Green Dragon Inn which is actually a fully working pub and had a pint and a snack to eat before heading back. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon and from the comments on the single pic I shared on Instagram and Facebook I think I have succeeded in making people jealous. Life Mission accomplished!