Doebler TravelBlog: Rotorua and Hobbiton

We had a beautiful drive down to Rotorua yesterday. The countryside is rolling hills. The hills are a beautiful shade of green and quite steep in places. It looks like what I imagine Ireland must look like, a glowing green emerald color from all surrounding hills, dotted with sheep.

There are Barberry hedges everywhere along the landscape, much as I imagine in England. There miles and miles of this terrain. We have also seen many railroad tracks, but no trains! Lindsay said there are not many trains here. Chuck is on the hunt to find and capture the elusive train on film. Good luck to him!

So, you drive and drive through this unbelievable green countryside, and then you come along a small little village that is equally unbelievably quaint. The houses are all one story outside the larger cities. Each house is a small little one story bungalow with a little tiny yard, surrounded by a cute little “Corgi” sized fence. Inside the fence are little gardens with beautiful gardens of flowers and vegetables. It is like a little Hobbit city, but instead of Hobbit Holes, like in the movie, little small more modern homes. The houses are, for the most part, painted bright colors with contrasting trims on the doors and windows. This makes each town. No matter how basic, look incredibly cute and adorable!

As we arrived in Rotorua, you notice the distinct sulphur smell. It is everywhere. They have mudpots and mud baths here that use the “resources” from the geothermal steam emulating from the ground everywhere in town. It is just smelly to us.

We took the bus to the farm that was used for the Hobbit Village in the movie Lord of the Rings. There is much activity on this farm because there are workers and construction people all over creating an even larger village for the upcoming movie “The Hobbit”. It was phenomenal to see these sets creating this beautiful little village out of a small hilled area here. The actual set and village takes up quite a bit of land area and it is very well along in the building process. It was incredibly interesting and we felt fortunate to have gotten to see it, because they are so far along, I can’t imagine that they will be allowing tours much longer, with people traipsing all over the movie set area, when they have taken such care to build so meticulous locations. I can’t wait to see the movie and see these places again.

We also got to see the working part of this sheep farm. There are 8K sheep on 1250 acres. They were herding and shearing, etc. We got to feed some babies (they are always hungry apparently). We watched them shear some sheep and something I did not know was that mandolin is from sheep. The oils that are on their wool is secreted from their skin and that “oil” is lanolin. When we touched the sheep after they were sheared, we had lanolin all over our hands!

We returned to Rotorua and walked to a large lake in town. There were a couple seaplanes on the lake. People were

feeding gulls and black swans, which was weird. There are only black swans here, no white ones. There are many black swans, not as many as the Canadian Geese back home, but still, there are a lot. They must have the same problems with them and their “droppings” because there were signs showing you were not suppose to feed them. Oops, I guess those people we saw didn’t see the signs!

They have these beautiful trees that are filled with beautiful flowers growing everywhere here. Some have so many flowers you can not see the green leaves, just all pink or purple flowers. These trees stand about 20 feet high and have multiple trunks.