Today we drive onwards to Watamata to get to the home of the hobbits. Caz is like a frenzied child.
However, our first stop is for some food in Cambridge near Hamilton. According to Lonely Planet this town strives towards Victorian traditionalism with its architecture, but to me it looks like a typical strip mall town.
Caz and I have annoyed Mary by insisting that we want to get to Auckland in time to meet Joost, the shiny happy Dutchman from the UK to Oz leg of our trip who has just completed his sponsored cycle from Slope Point, the southern-most tip of the south island, to Cape Reinga, the northern most point of the North Island. It’s remarkable that he managed to do it, seeing as how he hadn’t done any training for it at all. Anyway, if we dawdle over the next couple of days, we will miss him in Auckland, but Mary doesn’t like being rushed. We compensate by dropping her at a stud farm she has decided to visit, but only because we are promised the tour of the farm will only take an hour.
Afterwards, we drive on to the Hobbiton Lord of the Rings film set, which is on a working farm. There are options to do a tour of the set which includes a tour of the farm too. Mary and Caz decide to do this, I think because Caz quite fancies being a sheep when she watches the shearers doing their work. At NZ $65, I decide that I am not quite excited enough about this, so sit in the van waiting for them to return while lamenting the demise of our beloved van Olive with her portraits of Gandalf and Gollum. How cool would we have been showing up here with her? Or perhaps very uncool? We would have been a talking point anyway, but instead I sit reading and waiting in our doodlebug bedecked van Albert.
When they come back, Caz seems slightly disappointed to have found the hobbit houses unfurnished and looking like a shell of their celluloid versions. However, she does seem excited about a particular sheep shearer she saw in action, though when she says that he looked about nineteen, I tell her she’s a dirty old bird.
We aim to visit a warm water beach on the Coromandel Pensinsula tomorrow, so we follow directions from the Department of Conservation handbook for the nearest campsite we can get to before it is dark. This involves a drive of several kilometres on a stone track to ‘Broken Hills’ campsite, presumably hills having been broken because this is another former mining area.
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| spot the real horse |
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