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| Our cheapo rental with Trevor driving on the "wrong" side of the road |
We decided to go see all a bunch of the “must-see” tourist spots first so we rented a car and headed into the interior of the North Island (south of Auckland). Our first stop was at Hobbiton.. For those of you, like myself, who don’t know anything about Lord of the Rings, Hobbiton is where parts of Lords of the Rings movies and later the Hobbit movies were filmed. There are lots of rolling hills, hobbit holes and sheep. Apparently they did an aerial search for a location for the set and came across the 1250acre area owned by a sheep farmer. Once filming had commenced the farmer would be called, sometimes with just a couple of hours notice, to move is thousands of sheep from the rolling hills behind the area they were going to film in next. Driving through the area we could see white dots all over the hillsides and can’t imagine how they were able to get every last one out of the shot.
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| Hillsides full of sheep |
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| My favorite sheep at the Hobbiton farm |
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| Party Tree at Hobbiton |
Next, we headed for Rotorua were we planned to spend 2 nights. As we entered Rotorua we could smell rotten eggs (Sulfur) and knew we had reached our destination. Rotorua is full of thermal activity causing it to be a bit stinky.While in Rotorua we paid to enter the Te Puia thermal park and were pretty impressed. We were able to watch men working on Maori Carvings in a school they have there, women working on Maori basket weaving in the weaving school they have there, boiling mud pools, thermal waters, geysers and a kiwi bird.
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| Carvings at entrance of Gyser Park |
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| Carving School |
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Top of silver fern
Bottom, silver side, of a NZ silver fern. |
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Steam from cracks in the rocks
One of the many bubbling mud pool
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Rest of Tiki Tour...... to be continued.....
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