At first, we were unsure, whether it would really be a good idea to visit the Hobbiton movie set (David), or whether it would be way too touristy (I, Fe). But then we decided to give it a go. Following advice from a friend we wanted to book one of the last tours of the day, but the weather forecast convinced us that an earlier tour would be better.

Since we drove down from North of Auckland we ended up arriving over an hour too early, so we went for a short walk to a nearby Geocache, which was lovingly hidden behind a hobbit door in a hill, visited the gift shop, which had beautiful post cards, but not much else of interest and then finally checked in. They offered us an “upgrade” to an earlier tour, which we took.

While waiting for our tour to start, it started to rain (so much for the weather forecast!), so we boarded the bus and hoped that it would pass.

Once on site, the rain had stopped again, and we could get our first glimpse of Hobbiton.

For the visitors without havy raincoats huge umbrellas were handed out. Quite handy to hide them on pictures.

Hobbiton was discovered as Peter Jackson and his location scout flew over the area by helicopter. After the filming was finished, only a couple of holes in the hills remained. To everyone’s surprise, after the film became a huge hit, lots of fans wanted to come and visit Hobbiton. However, there was not that much to see. So, when the decision was made to rebuild Hobbiton for the filming of The Hobbit movies, they chose more lasting materials and opened it up to the public once the filming was completed.

At Hobbiton there are about 48 (David says 44, but as I was proofreading, I changed it to a more accurate number) Hobbit holes in various sizes. This was made because the filming leveraged forced perspective that human actors could appear small like Hobbits (for this the houses were built at 100% scale) or as tall as wizards (70 – 80% scale).

The grandest Hobbit hole of all is, of course, Bags End. Unfortunatelly, it is too high above the path to get a superb picture.

But all the others were worth inspecting as well, as everyone was lovingly and distinctly decorated (from the dried fish at the fisher’s hole, to bees at the beekeeper’s and cheese at the Cheese mongers).

The gardens in Hobbiton were also a sight to behold with lots of vegetables and flowers that were currently in season.

After a long and rambling walk through Hobbiton, where we could also look behind one of the doors (there isn’t much there, only outside scenes were filmed here), we headed along a nice path to the Green Dragon, where we could enjoy a complimentary beer and relax for a bit, before the bus took us back to the carpark.

In summary, we were positively surprised. Despite the dozens of tourists, the whole place had a real charming atmosphere, which was helped by our enthusiastic guide. So, we can really recommend visiting Hobbiton.