Auckland

Delayed post of this one –  I guess I just forgot to upload it when I had Tahiti and everything to talk about!

Had a quiet flight over with Qantas – as a nice surprise, dinner was served onboard. Just as well, since by the time I’d gotten out of the airport, caught a shuttle downtown and then a bus to the hostel (on Ponsonby Road, aka hipster town), it was pushing 9pm and I didn’t feel like doing much. I meant to get to bed pretty quickly (after my 4am-6.30am sleep the night before) but some people were watching Saw in the hostel lounge and I got sucked in. Pretty sure I could only stand it because I’d read the story on Wikipedia long ago, and to be honest it wasn’t worth watching at all. Was disappointed that the hostel charged for wifi, but since I still had my unlimited global roaming data with T-Mobile, I didn’t need it really.

Tuesday morning I woke up at 11am because someone was changing the linen on the bed above me – probably about time! I headed off around noon to walk into the city, easy enough as you could see the skyline ahead of you. It was a nice walk, downhill to the city center, where I stopped in at a Whisky Shop, featuring the first New Zealand whisky I’d seen! Apparently there was a distillery for a few decades which closed down six years ago when it was bought out by Seagramm’s. There are three brand new ones now, one of which is selling old stock from the last distillery and the other two nothing yet. They had a 1986 bottling, commemorating ‘New Zealand’s greatest sporting victory’, for $300! I wandered the downtown walking area for a bit, one street had some nice random street art.

I also stopped in at a bookshop, and eventually made it to Albert Park, a nice but very steep park on the other side of the CBD (about an hour after leaving the hostel). It was filled with uni students, since it bordered Auckland Uni. I walked through the uni (didn’t feel conspicuous at all since my wardrobe hasn’t changed in a decade) and picked up a student magazine (decently solid writing, in general) and took a few pictures, on my way to the Domain on the far side. In the middle of the Domain I visited the WinterGarden, a conservatory with a hot area, temperate area and fernery

and then the Auckland War Museum (actually a museum of everything) which was pretty fascinating – they had one exhibit on Gallipoli Minecraft, a replica of the Gallipoli peninsula built in MineCraft by school students over eight months (museum site). From there I headed downtown and joined an internet Eating Club meetup at Better Burger that I’d seen on reddit – reasonably expensive burger but actually pretty good, some interesting people including one guy who works on cruise ships, 4 months on 2 months off. Headed home at 9pm.

Wednesday – meant to be up early but my phone died and I forgot that my fitbit time was still two hours behind. So I didn’t catch a bus across to Piha beach, but returned to the museum for a pretty good cultural performance, which included a careful description of the quarterstaff, with sharp blades along the ends and points, and some demonstrations of exercises with it.

Then I headed back downtown, organized my bus to Hobbiton for the next day, stopped and read a Margaret Mahy book with some Lemonade and Paeroa at the Central Library, and walked back down Ponsonby for some fish and chips and icecream.

Thursday – Hobbiton!!!

I caught a bus from downtown at 7.30am. I walked down, seeing a few early commuters on the way. It was about a four hour drive, so I read and slept and looked out at the scenery a little. Once I got to Matamata (the town the actual tours go from) I had about three hours to kill (that’s what you get for doing the

cheapo $80 version with Naked Bus instead of the tourbus option for $250). I wandered around spotting Hobbit references and browsing the book collection at the three op-shops I found, then sat down at a café for lunch for a while. Finally my 2pm bus was ready and we were off! The village itself is entirely on a private farm, about 2km from the road and entirely hidden by rolling hills that certainly look very English! Apparently for the Lord of the Rings, nobody considered any tourist plans and the set was a normal plywood version that was all destroyed at the end (actually, it was destroyed in a giant bonfire – which is shown in the movie, I am told, as the Shire on fire in Frodo’s dream of what will happen if he doesn’t destroy the Ring!). Then once the movies came out, the locals figured out that’s what had been filming nearby, and word spread, and some obsessive types tried visiting the farm. The farmers, being quite intelligent it sounds, were then ready when Jackson came back asking to re-rent the place for The Hobbit. They rented it to him on condition that the entire village was built in a proper long-lasting way, and that they could run tours on it afterwards (would be curious to know what the licensing looks like!). So now there’s some 50-odd hobbit house front doors and gardens and paths, plus the Green Dragon inn and mill that was built specially for tours. Almost all of the doors are just facades, only the Baggins house and one other has any room behind it (indoor filming was all done in a studio. The indoor set of Baggins house is now Peter Jackson’s guest room, our tour guide said). The Baggins house is enormous, actually going around three sides of the hill. Above it is a tree – for the Lord of the Rings filming, Jackson spotted the perfect tree a few miles away and had it cut up, brought to Hobbiton and reassembled. Of course all the leaves fell off, so they made 250,000 oak leaves out of silk and wired them on. For The Hobbit, they needed the same tree – but 50 years younger. So they built it entirely from scratch, modelled on the existing tree, and wired on 200,000 silk leaves. Then the week before filming when Jackson arrives, he says the color looks wrong – and they got people up on ladders to spray paint each leaf a new shade of green.

I found a few silk leaves on the path and picked them up, in three different shades of green – but they probably aren’t from the movie, because the guide mentioned that it does shed leaves and they get constantly replaced.

Our tour ended at the Green Dragon, where you get one complimentary drink and can buy more, or some food. I tried a steak pie, which was pretty decent. We got back to Matamata about 5pm, so I only had an hour to wait for the bus. I went to the grocery store while waiting and made it back to my hostel just in time to cook dinner before the kitchen closed at 10.30.

Friday – my last day dawned gloomy and wet. I decided to go for a walk anyway because I’m hardcore like that, and walked down to the Auckland harbour and back to the hostel

going past a lot of nice old houses that mum would have loved on they way. I knew where to go because I’d skimmed a ‘walking tours in Auckland’ guide in one of the bookstores I’d stopped in earlier in the week, and it had one that started from right about my hostel! Then an uneventful trip to the airport – my only complaint was that there was no New Zealand whisky available at duty-free, what is wrong with them?