Middle Earth

Our last few remaining days on the Northern Island of New Zealand were spent in Hamilton, which has a few nearby attractions that are definite must sees. The first is the Waitomo Glowworm Caves which we made sure to visit on our drive up from Taupō. We had booked a tour as it was the only way to get to see the bioluminescent cave dwellers. We lucked out a bit because a big chunk of our tour group was delayed and had to reschedule which meant we had a much smaller group!

When we got near to the cave’s entrance, our guide knelt down by the creek and asked if we wanted to see the eels. As he did, a few eels started swimming right to him and he was handling them like they were domesticated. It was fascinating and creepy all at once. He then gave us the opportunity to feed them some Spam off of a popsicle stick. DawnO felt like she needed to give it a go and I was more than happy to take the pictures from a distance. She got to touch one and said it was slimier than she expected. That validated my decision to hang back.

Next up was the main event! We walked into the cave and once our eyes adjusted to the darkness we could see thousands of glow worms on the ceiling of the cave. Apparently they aren’t worms at all, but maggots. Our guide said that fact doesn’t help sell a lot of tickets so they stick to calling them glowworms instead. They are quite a long creature and just the tip of their tails glow. This light lures their prey into sticky threads that hang down from the cave. Once a bug flies into one of these threads, it’s dinner time!

We eventually made our way to a waterway where we took a raft deeper into the cave with the ceiling lit up with thousands of glowworms. Unfortunately we weren’t able to capture very good images as we would have required a tripod so I have found one from the web that shows what we experienced.

After our tour we continued to Hamilton and got settled in to our new accommodations. The next day we decided to tour Hamilton Gardens, another popular attraction. This was a large park and featured different gardens from around the world. We were both quite impressed with the accuracy of a lot of the countries. We actually felt like we were walking through India, Italy, and Japan. Most plants were authentic, but they did have a few fake ones so they could make it through the New Zealand winters. One of the more fun gardens was the ‘surreal garden’ which drew its inspiration from Alice in Wonderland.

Last on our attractions checklist was a big one for me. We booked ourselves a tour of Hobbiton from the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies.

You’ll have to excuse DawnO’s lack of enthusiasm in the above picture. You see we have a bit of history with the Lord of the Rings films. She has trauma from when I force fed her the Extended editions of these movies in the early days of our relationship. She has actually said the following words when asked if she wants to watch a LOTR film, “I would rather jump into Mt Doom and end myself.” So now, if ever I plan a date night that I’m afraid might be a bit lame I’ll give her a choice between that or a movie night featuring Lord of the Rings. It always makes the lame option look a bit more appealing. Anyway, back to Middle Earth…

Hobbiton was originally build in 1999 out of cheap movie set materials and was never meant to be a permanent fixture in the NZ countryside. Once the filming of the first trilogy was completed, the land was returned to its natural hobbitless state. When they rebuilt Hobbiton for the Hobbit trilogy, they realized that they had an opportunity to make some serious tourist dollars so they made the town exactly as before, but with quality materials. They have a full time staff gardening and manicuring the set which pumps hundreds of tourists through a day. Walking through it was really quite cool. I estimate we saw around 30-40 hobbit holes which were just exteriors. The hobbit holes were built to different scales to achieve the forced perspective trickery in the films. (For more information I suggest you watch the 300 million hours of behind the scenes docs that come with the extended editions of the original trilogy. Your significant other will love it).

Next we got to go into a hobbit hole which was a relatively new attraction. The interior shots in the movies were not done on this set but they built movie realistic interiors to 2 of their holes. It really added to the tour to get to see the interior.