NZ Day 6 – The Hobbit Banquet

   
Today was to be a day of touristy stuff in NZ. I got the distinct impression this was not going to be Claire’s favourite day of the holiday but I suppose doing tourist stuff in your country of birth isn’t really that exciting, regardless of if you’ve been to the locations before.
On our agenda was Waitomo caves and Hobbiton. But first there was a little three hour drive to get out of the way. I decided I should take my share of the driving today so the first leg from New Plymouth to Waitomo was mine. Claire did mention it wasn’t an easy drive but in my cavalier way I said I could handle it.

We seemed to go up and down about five mountains, windy roads and got stuck behind the trifecta, caravan, truck and camper van. I think the older I get, much to my dismay, I get more like my father. I spent most of the journey complaining about people going slow or another truck appearing on the horizon ahead. I did though unlike my dad ever would, stop on the way. I remember many childhood journeys where he refused to stop on en route.

We arrived at a very touristy looking Waitomo caves with tourist streaming all over the place and my spirits dropped a little. I find a very touristy experience can diminish my enjoyment of certain things but I was completely wrong. We were taken into the caves by a very jolly slow talking guy who I reckon would make a very good primary school teacher. He made a few dad jokes like ‘they say if you feel one or two drops of water in the caves, it’s good luck, if you feel more than three you’re under the toilets’. One of the caves we went into was famous for singers holding concerts in and one of our group took the plunge and sing. She would have been late teens/early twenties. Such is the shamelessness of the youth eh? The sound of her singing filled the cave in such a rounded way. Our guide let us know the acoustics were pretty much perfect.

This incident though was preceded by a funny event. One customer in the group in front of us asked our tour guide to be quiet because he couldn’t hear his tour guide, to which our guide replied ‘talk to your tour guide not me’, the customer then kept waffling on and our guide was having none of it so he asked our singer to sing as loud as possible.

We got on a boat to drift through the glowworm caves which was quite amazing. They twinkled like stars on the ceilings and walls and lit the caves like a bright night sky. If you looked closely you could see them wriggling so the light was never static. It’s very rare you have the opportunity to sit in the dark, in silence and admire your surroundings in such a way. It was quite awe inspiring and something I was glad I did.

A short drive our motel for the night in Cambridge was followed by us heading out pretty quickly to Hobbiton to see where The Hobbit was filmed. Again I harboured a few worries that this would be a major touristy event and maybe ruined by that however I was pleasantly surprised to find the group numbers were limited, the tour guide funny and the whole experience pretty neat. It started with a tour around Hobbiton itself with the guide explaining how’s the Hobbit holes were built to how the whole place was kept. I did find myself wondering why they’d chose to build something and preserve it that they used only very sparingly in the film but I suppose it was one of the only fixed locations.
The culmination of the tour was a hobbit banquet at the Green Dragon pub. There was way to much food but of course as with every banquet everyone does have a habit of over eating. I think the beer was nice, I tried both on tap and couldn’t complain.

After 5 hours in Hobbiton we jumped on the bus and returned to the car. Only to realise both our phones had died and we didn’t really know where our motel was apart from 30 mins away. Probably the first real test of our relationship but together we pieced together the fragments of our memories and reached the motel after only three or four wrongly taken roads.

IJS