Hobbiton

After swinging by our favourite café on The Mount, Eighty Eight, to pick up some sweet and savoury treats for breakfast, we motored on to Matamata, where we had a plans to visit the set of Hobbiton, used in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies.

A Hobbity hole

Built on the Alexander farm, which offered rolling green hills, trees and a suitably 'Shire-like' appearance, some forty-odd hobbit residences were built for the first set of films, torn down after completion, and then rebuilt on a permanent basis for the subsequent 'prequels' and for the enjoyment of visitors such as ourselves.

Menfolk in the Shire!

The scale of the outdoor 'set' is astonishing. While there is some artifice - the tree at Bag End cottage is made of steel and expanding foam, with around 200,000 leaves individually wired onto its branches - the gardening team keep genuine vegetables growing in the hobbity veg patches.

Sadly, the inside of the hobbit holes beyond the round doors are not fully featured - save for a small piece of Bilbo's corridor - as the inside sets were constructed and filmed in Wellington.

Bag End

However, the Green Dragon pub is complete and furnished with man-sized chairs and tables.

Down the local

At the end of the tour, we were able to sit and relax with a hobbit-sized cup of ale - choosing from a stout, amber ale, cider, or ginger beer, all of which are produced by the Good George brewery. The 1% abv beer that was used on set, called Sobering Thoughts, has long since run out.

It comes in 568ml bottles?!

Sadly, it was time to part from our friends and travelling companions, who had shared our journey for the past two weeks. They will be returning to the UK via Hong Kong, while we venture on to South America next week.

Meanwhile, we have a few more days to enjoy the NZ countryside and make our way leisurely back to Auckland. For tonight's pitch, we chose Little Waipa, on the east bank of the Waikato River. This is a free and spacious camping spot, with no facilities bar a public toilet.

Silver lining

Having parked up at the scenic spot, we took a walk along the path and boardwalk upriver to the Arapuni swing bridge connecting the village to the far side of the river and power station.

Arapuni swing bridge and power station

Arapuni is downstream of the Huka Falls in Taupo that we visited last week and the raging torrents of water there can be seen still flowing fast towards their ultimate destination - the Tasman Sea. Our 12km round-trip walk had given us an appetite for dinner, which we prepared inside the van, sheltering from the on-and-off rain. Easy pineapple fried rice was on the menu, which we ate tucked up watching (what else) the third installment of the Lord of the Rings.