Fangirling in Hobbiton, New Zealand
- ereed231
- May 25, 2016
- 7 min read
What a country!
I mean I generally heard good things but I just wasn’t expecting to fall in love like I did. Its beauty is unparalleled I’ll try not to overwhelm you with pictures but I make no promises.
From Auckland, I jumped aboard a bus that would take me to the Northern tip of the North Island. The bus was the super awesome Kiwi Experience. If you’ve met a backpacker who has travelled NZ, the likelihood is they’ll have travelled it on this tour bus. You buy a ticket that's valid on their trail for 12 months and you can stop wherever you like for however long as it works with a ‘hop on/hop off’ system. I met the loveliest group of people, predominantly English crowd with one Swiss guy and one Scot. Occasionally the bus is referred to as the ‘shag bus’ amongst other crowds for reasons that aren’t hard to understand when you get the same group of single, young backpackers travelling together for a month. Our group knew the score though, we wanted to enjoy NZ thoroughly sans drama. So other than the time Michael got absolutely bladdered on his birthday, got banned from a club, ran at speed into a wall and had to be physically carried back to the hostel and hauled onto his top bunk, we were pretty much devoid of drama!
In the Bay of Islands the scenery was beautiful and it was then I started absolutely loving the walks and hikes available in the areas we were staying. I’d say New Zealand is a cross between a really excellent, upgraded (x1000) version of the English Lake District and a shittier, less digitally enhanced version of the epic scenery in the Lord of the Rings movies.
In Paihia, I visited the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. I learnt so much about the Maori-New Zealander relations and it really opened my eyes again to that time when the British tried to take over everywhere – India to Malaysia, Australia to NZ – I realised I knew shockingly little about the British Empire and I was seeing first-hand the effect and influences it had on varying countries.
The Maori people seem to be in a more fortunate position than the Aboriginal Australians. To simplify massively, land was taken from the Aboriginals in the 18th Century and they never recovered their sense of ownership and pride they had once had of their country, and to generalise horrendously; there is an ongoing resentment between the groups. However, the Maori people actually signed a treaty with the British Empire that meant they could stay and maintain a degree of control when the English came knocking in 1840. It was seen as inevitable from both sides, the British were going to take over New Zealand no matter what but getting them to sign a treaty was what they believed to be an easy out, avoiding warfare and bloodshed by signing a document that meant everything to the Maori people and not much at all to the British. In this sense, the Maoris have maintained pride and ownership of the land and they have a strong presence and role in modern NZ culture.
The Haka, the traditional war dance performed before rugby games by New Zealand’s team, the All Blacks (FYI not a black supremacist group I believed them to be when I first arrived in the country) is something each player takes part in, whether Maori or not. The names of so many places in NZ have kept their original Maori names (see map above) and they have Maori symbolism everywhere, including their currency. There appears to be a much stronger sense of equality between the people in NZ than in Oz. Then again, this is based on a couple of months in each country so I'm probably just spouting off more sweeping generalisations.
Maori Experience SingAlong!
Raining in Wellington
I think it came as a surprise to everybody – but mostly me – how much I loved going to the movie set and location of the Lord of the Rings, the fantastical village of Hobbiton. I went at the insistence of everyone else, it was expensive and I was really trying to penny-pinch in NZ as much as I could – Aus had bled me dry and it was only getting worse! So despite grumbling about how little I cared and the price (the equivalent of about £60 or something?) as soon as our overly-keen classic LOTR superfan tour guide got us to the outskirts of the Hobbiton village and we could see the expanse ahead of us, my mouth hung open and I decided right there and then that I DO believe in magic and Gandalf and fairies AND ALL THING WONDERFUL!
Our guide pointed out where parts of the movies were filmed, which ‘hobbit hole’ Bilbo lived in, how the perspective shots were filmed and I was surprised how it all came flooding back to me; my actual mad love for the whole franchise in my early teens! The 5am wake-ups with my sister Clare to try and watch all 3 movies before the rest of the family woke up (obviously impossible), my first huge celebrity crush on Legolas/Orlando Bloom and the dozens of posters of him stuck on my bedroom wall, trying (and failing) to play the Hobbiton/Shire theme song on my violin!! The euphoric memories literally hit me in the space of a couple of seconds just as I heard the guide say-
‘Around here is what you’ll recognise from the opening scene of the first movie when Frodo says to Gandalf “You’re late” and Gandalf replies-’
‘-A WIZARD IS NEVER LATE!!’ I cried out hysterically from the back behind 15 of my backpacker buddies. Faces turned my way looking amused and embarrassed for me as I slowly brought my hand down from the air (had I absently raised it as I shouted the answer??). The guide wasn’t asking a question at all, it never even looked as if he was about to. I am just ridiculous. I laughed awkwardly and told him to continue, he did quite calmly, if a little stunned. I did shout really loud but I HAD JUST THAT SECOND REALISED HOW MUCH I REALLY DO LOVE THE LORD OF THE RINGS!!
I opted out of the bungee/skydiving activity that was so popular amongst us tourists, it was the go-to backpacker conversation starter in NZ i.e. ‘have you done it yet?’ ‘when are you doing it??’ ‘you’re not going?’ ‘Oh you’re scared!’. IT WASN’T BECAUSE I WAS SCARED! Well the MAIN reason for not doing it wasn’t because I was scared anyway… it’s just really expensive, like hundreds of pounds. I’ve put it on the back burner for later travels… I did decide to try my hand at the fabled ‘black water rafting’ activity that cropped up as an unique experience in Waitomo on the North Island. I’ve loved white water rafting when I’ve done it in the past so I thought this would be a lot of fun, rafting in caves – awesome!
The experience was very cool in many ways, it was novel, exciting, a bit scary and brought flashbacks of the movie ‘The Descent’ (a scary movie where people are caving and then killed off my horrifying man-eating cave creatures). I was expecting to get a little damp maybe 10% of my body submerged at any one time – rafting needed water after all – but I did not expect to end up swimming the majority of the time fully submerging swimming through water at -10 degrees. It felt like seriously false advertising. It was pitch black and genuinely the coldest I ever remember being, so cold I kept forgetting how to swim. The ‘rafting’ part of it was actually ‘tubing’, being pulled along by a guide – as there was no current - floating in rubber rings for 10 minutes and looking up at the glow worms (actually really pretty) and being dragged back in the direction we came from. Other than the glow worms it felt a little pointless. We climbed up and down a few cave waterfalls, again pretty cool but the long stretches of swimming/floundering started to wear on me. I found my throat closing up (?!) and I’m pretty sure I was close to passing out. I was so cold I’d forgotten how warm felt, as if I’d never get that feeling back again. It was at this point I realised that I was trying to convince myself that I was having fun - ‘Iamhavingagoodtime, Iamhavingagoodtime’. I don’t know about you but when I’m genuinely enjoying myself I’ve never had cajole myself into believing it…
One of my last stops was my favourite, Queenstown. The place is a giant ski resort town and was heaving with tourists as it was peak ski season. It has many faux-wooden chalet type bars/restaurants cluttered together in ad hoc way by the side of a beautiful lake which has snowcapped mountains all along the edge, some rather aptly called the ‘Remarkables’. One of the best bits of QT was seeing George again, one of my Asia travelling buddies. It was so much fun to explore, play frisbee golf, fail at rope-swings and hike seriously icy mountains with him and the gang, I felt right at home. The town is definitely one of the coolest I’d visited at this point, despite the hostels being some of the dirtiest I’d experienced over 11 months of #hostellife. Nomads in Queenstown... What can I say other than if you stay in one of the dorms here don’t expect to have a full night’s sleep without the sounds/vibrations of snoring, farting, shagging and/or someone drunkenly weeing on your bed. Seriously disgusting, but some of my funniest travel stories have come from what I witnessed at that place!
I wistfully left a group of my new faves who’d just decided to live together, see out the ski season and get jobs etc, this was one of the only places around the world I was seriously tempted to stay longer but my flight was booked and the road was calling my name… or maybe it was the sun, warmth and luscious palm trees on the islands of Fiji…
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