There and Back Again

This past weekend we took our first road trip out of the greater Auckland metropolitan area to explore some more of “Middle Earth”.  We visited the central region of the North Island, which is well known for it’s beautiful lakes, geothermal features, and rich Maori culture and history.  The main hub of activity is in Rotorua, affectionately known by the locals as Roto-Vegas.  One of the highlights of our long weekend was definitely the tour of the Hobbiton movie set.

Peter Jackson built Hobbiton for the Lord of the Rings trilogy on a sheep farm near Matamata (about two hours south of Auckland).  The original agreement was that he would build a temporary movie set and then tear everything down and return the farm to its original state once filming was complete.  As it turns out, people began to flock (pun intended) to the farm from all over the world to see Bag End, the Green Dragon, and the rest of Shire.  So when Jackson needed to reconstruct Hobbiton for the Hobbit trilogy, he agreed to build it out of permanent materials and leave it intact for tours after filming was complete.   Visitors are now treated to a two-hour guided tour of the set as well as a free drink at the Green Dragon at the completion of the tour.

In all there are 44 hobbit holes scattered throughout the set.  Some are “human” scale (tiny) and others are “hobbit” scale (normal size) so that the filmmakers could produce the appropriate visual effects.  Each has it’s own specific character and backstory and they are all very detailed.

 

The tour guide told us many stories about Peter Jackson’s attention to detail during filmmaking.  Even though the set was built on a working sheep farm, he thought the resident sheep were too “modern” looking.  The Humane Society of NZ wouldn’t allow him to spray paint the sheep black, so he flew an entire flock of black sheep in from England at great expense.

Jackson also felt very strongly about having an oak tree atop Bag End, as it’s described in the books.  There was a very large pine tree close by, but Jackson specifically wanted an oak.  His first plan was to have workers strip every pine needle off of the pine tree and tie oak leaves back onto it before filming, but that was taking too long, so they chopped down a nearby oak tree and temporary “planted” it above Bag End for the LoTR filming.  The interesting thing is that when they decided to use the same location for The Hobbit movies, they needed to recreate the tree (but make it look 60 years younger), so this time they constructed an artificial tree out of steel and attached thousands of fabric oak leaves to it by hand.  Here’s a picture of the steel tree – Luke even received one of the leaves as a souvenir!

At the end of the tour, visitors are treated to a free drink at the Green Dragon, just at the bottom of the hill below Bag End.  The inside of the inn has just as much intricate detail as the rest of the set and has a working café that sells drinks and snacks.  

Ashlyn and I sampled some of the local spirits while the kids tried ginger beer (a non-alcoholic soft drink similar to root beer that’s popular in NZ).  Even though we saw the whole set, I’m still hoping to come back on my eleventy-first birthday.

The Kiwi Burger

You probably know that the national bird of New Zealand is the kiwi.  We haven’t seen one yet, but here’s a photo.  

We’ll just put that on the “to do” list for now.  We have seen a lot of other cool things including the Auckland Museum, the Auckland Art Gallery, and the Botanic Garden.  All beautiful, inspiring (in their own way), and free!  That’s a real treat for us as residents since so many other things are expensive.  But too many photos for this week’s blog.

We’ve also taken some time just to hang out in our house, watch tv and get acclimated to NZ pop culture, advertising and humor (plus remember, we had no internet at home for the first 10 days!).  We’ve watched a Maori movie, “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here” from Australia, and even American Idol (thinking that Harry Connick Jr. is very goofy!).  We all really got a kick out of a McDonald’s commercial for the 25^th reunion of the Kiwi burger.  Imagine adults dressed in costumes representing each part of the burger (lettuce, tomato, meat patty, etc.), shy at first and then having a major dance party at their reunion.  You might have to see it to appreciate it.

We took the good part of a day last week to visit a huge park to the west on the Waitakere ranges.  It’s a great area with bush, rainforest, and amazing beaches.  We visited Lion Rock (pictured here) and the Karekare Falls (also pictured here).  

The surf where we live in St. Heliers Bay is very calm and welcoming for swimmers.  The surf by Lion Rock is for the much more adventurous and expert surfers.  The sand there is a beautiful color of black and gold.  We also enjoyed the Arataki Visitor Centre which gave us a good orientation to the area.

On the way home we had, you guessed it, a Kiwi burger!  We stopped at BurgerFuel, a bit more upscale that “Maccas” – that’s McDonald’s here.  The Kiwi burger had an egg and sliced beet on it.  We enjoyed it with L&Ps the local drink of “lemony good stuff” as their label says.  Cheers! 

Settling in to Auckland

Gooday from the Land of the Long White Cloud!  We’ve been in New Zealand for five days and it’s been great so far.  Our flight from Hawaii to Auckland was delayed by several hours, but once we got to Auckland, everything has gone smoothly.  We were met at the airport by an old friend of a friend named Mat, who gave us a ride to our rental house where we met Lynette, my collaborator, and her daughter Georgia (who were just leaving for a week’s vacation), as well as our rental agent.  We also unpacked our luggage, which didn’t take very long since we each only had one 50lb. checked bag and one 15lb. carry-on bag!  It was nice to spread out and not sleep in the same hotel room for the first time in a week.

For the past few days, we’ve been exploring different parts of Auckland, while trying to get settled in and oriented.  We’ve been going to the public library in our region of the city, St. Heliers, each day to catch up on emails and do some research.  We live very close to several nice beaches in Auckland including St. Heliers, Kohimarama Beach, and Mission Bay.  In addition to strolling up and down the beaches every day, we’ve also checked out several of the many public parks in Auckland, including Albert Park, Michael Savage Memorial Park, and One Tree Hill (the inspiration for the U2 song).  Here's Luke near the summit of One Tree Hill.

On our first day in Auckland, we stumbled upon an amazing French bistro in our neighborhood named La Fourchette, where Ashlyn drank, quite possibly, the most beautiful (and best tasting) café mocha of her life.  New Zealanders take their coffee very seriously, but that’s for another episode.

Mat has loaned us his car for the next three weeks while he is in Australia, so I have started driving a few places.  So far, driving on the left side of the road hasn’t been nearly as difficult as I was expecting.  I actually think I’m adjusting much faster to driving than to some of the other differences (Celsius, the metric system, etc.).  Today we drove to an area of the city known as the North Shore, where we explored the remnants of Fort North Head, had a picnic lunch and strolled up and down Narrow Neck Beach, and then walked around the shops in Takapuna.  You get great views of Rangitoto Island (just across the water from downtown Auckland) from many places in Auckland, including the North Shore beaches.

We hope that all of our friends back in the States are warm and dry and we look forward to catching up with many of you via Facetime and Skype in the coming weeks and months.

Cheers,

Kevin

Luke's first blog post

Well, we’ve already realized that we should have called this blog “Ferb, I know what we are going to do today,” but in our adventure Ferb talks!

Please welcome our first guest blogger, Luke Wilson, a recently turned ten year old and world traveler.  Here are his impressions of stop number one – Maui:

One word describes Maui: AwesomesauceJ!  My top three favorite things were the food, the fashion, and the whales.  The best thing I ate was a hamburger at Cool Cat Café in Lahaina.  It tasted good and my mom enjoyed the Blue Hawaiian.  Lahaina is where the big banyan tree is that is basically a park, it is so huge!

I picked out a new hat at Crazy Shirts.  It looked good and it was on sale.  I bought it at Whalers Village near our resort.  We stayed at the Hyatt in Maui and could walk there.  I like that it is very casual and not so fancy in Hawaii.

On Saturday we took a boat trip on the Terlani 2 to go snorkeling and whale watching.  We saw several whales.  The first thing you see is the whale spout.  If you keep watching, you might see his tale.  We got lucky and saw a whale flip up out of the water! 

Go MauiJ!