A big thanks to Mike Burke from Aurecon for pointing us at Hobbiton (among other places). I suspect we’d have made it there anyway – it seems somehow inevitable – but it was certainly from Mike that I first heard about this place.
It would be a shame to visit New Zealand and not experience something of Middle Earth. I’m not about to spend our brief time here tracking down the various locations that were used to shoot The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but for sure we had to do something.
After LoTR was filmed, the original set for Hobbiton – located at the beautiful Alexander Farm near Matamata – was torn down.
When it was recreated for The Hobbit, Peter Jackson and Russell Alexander made the very canny business decision to make the set a little more solidly, the second time around, and to open it up for visitors. It has since become one of New Zealand’s fastest growing businesses.
I’m usually a little wary of this kind of “experience”, but I loved every…