18.02.2014 - Hobbinton / Waitomo

First things first, even though the door to my apartment here is not round the bed here in the motel seems
to be made for Hobbits. My feet were hanging mid air all night and it's not like I'm a giant with 184cm!

Today I got up early to be at 9:00am at the Hobbinton Movie Set. It's about a one hour drive from Tauranga
and it was a good idea to do the first tour there in the morning. It was cloudy and rained on my way there
but luckily it didn't rain at all at the movie set. Driving there was a bit like being back at home in Germany,
the landscape is pretty close to the landscape where I'm from. Well Waldböckelheim sounds like it could be
in the shire and Jörg also said that it looks like the shire there. Only thing missing here were the vineyards
and the vegetation is of course a bit different but the general look and feel is pretty much the same. :)

The tour was nice but more or less what I expected. It's nice to see it but it's not really a MUST see when you
are in New Zealand. They did a pretty good job with the set and being there first in the morning has the huge
advantage to not have hundreds of tourist in your pictures. So I got some nice pictures of the set and a touch
of being back at home so all in all it was worth the trip. Don't know, maybe I'm to close to this whole movie
shizzle to be super impressed by something like that.

After the Hobbinton tour I drove to Matamata to see the Waitomo Glowworm Caves. Well the cave was pretty
cool but the tour felt really short and smaller groups would have been nice. But I guess it's the main tourist
season and they also try to make a living ... it was still really nice. The glowworms at the ceiling looked really
beautiful almost like the night sky that I love to look at so much. If I had to choose between Hobbinton and
Waitomo, Waitomo for sure is the better choice. Nature triumphs over movie set without a doubt! Next time I
would probably do all the cave tours there and not just the one.

Coming out of the cave the sun also decided to come out from behind the clouds where she was hiding the
whole day. So I had really nice weather driving back to Tauranga and I decided to deviate a bit from what
the navigation system told me to do and drove a lot over small roads with almost no cars on it. Loved it!
A convertible would have been nice for the ride back to Tauranga.