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PAGE 22 BAY HARBOUR Latest Christchurch news at www. .kiwi<br />
Wednesday <strong>June</strong> 7 <strong>2017</strong><br />
Travel<br />
Find yourself spell-bound in<br />
• By Mike Yardley<br />
MATAMATA’S lush emerald<br />
pastures and roly-poly hills are<br />
happily home to Hobbiton, the<br />
ultimate cinematic shrine for<br />
set-jetters in New Zealand.<br />
Like a third of all visitors, I have<br />
never watched or read an entire<br />
story or movie, from either trilogy.<br />
But for starry-eyed Tolkien<br />
junkies, a journey here has acquired<br />
the stature of a pilgrimage.<br />
To reach the movie set entails<br />
a short drive by bus across the<br />
Alexander family’s farmland on<br />
a private sealed road, which was<br />
built by the New Zealand Army to<br />
service the convoy of crew production<br />
vehicles and equipment. Sir<br />
Peter Jackson sweet-talked the<br />
then Prime Minister, Helen Clark,<br />
to approve the road’s construction.<br />
Alighting from the bus, the<br />
bright green grass is long and lush<br />
as we trundle down the muddy<br />
track to the first hobbit house,<br />
where ‘the Hobbiton effect” suddenly<br />
washes over me.<br />
Unlike so many movie locations,<br />
Hobbiton casts you under<br />
its spell because it’s exactly the<br />
same as it appears on screen.<br />
It’s all so sweet and tender, with<br />
washing hanging on a line near a<br />
chimney poking out of a grassy<br />
mound.<br />
Baskets are plump with pumpkins,<br />
while flowers and herbs have<br />
been hung up to dry by a round<br />
yellow door.<br />
As we walked down a gravelled<br />
path, some members of my group<br />
frothed with delight, recognising<br />
it as the spot where Frodo Baggins<br />
greeted Gandalf at the start of The<br />
Fellowship of the Ring. And these<br />
tingly movie moments just kept on<br />
coming, as we strolled around the<br />
44 hobbit houses that are strung<br />
around the hillsides, fizzing with<br />
excitement being photographed<br />
outside Bag End or sitting on the<br />
see-saw beneath The Party Tree,<br />
where Bilbo held his eleventy-first<br />
birthday. I was fully submerged in<br />
the fantasy-meets-reality world of<br />
Middle Earth. It’s little wonder that<br />
450,000 visitors toured the movie<br />
set, last year alone.<br />
Winding our way around the<br />
hills, the panoramic views reach<br />
right across the lake to the stone<br />
bridge, the watermill and the<br />
Green Dragon Inn, which looked<br />
like a life-sized thatched cottage<br />
from my grandmother’s Lilliput<br />
Lane collection.<br />
REALISTIC:<br />
Hobbiton is<br />
exactly the<br />
same as it<br />
appears on<br />
screen.<br />
Saturday 8 – Saturday 22 July <strong>2017</strong><br />
Tickets on<br />
sale NOW!
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