Days 113-117: 3/10-14/24 - Hobbiton and Taupo!
3/10
Our travel day to New Zealand was fairly straightforward. A 2ish hour flight to Auckland and a 4ish hour drive down to Taupo took the whole day.
Some highlights:
Qantas airlines serves (really good) ice cream at the end of flights
Accidentally picking up the group with the rental car in the wrong loading zone and having to find a nearby empty parking lot to repack the car in
Driving on the other side of the road (frankly there hardest part was using the windshield wipers over the blinkers)
Going to book a Hobbiton tour for the coming week and there only being availability the following morning (phew to there being availability at all)
Late night shopping at our eventual arrival in Taupo (turns out US driver’s licenses don’t count as ID for alcohol, and we had to show our passports)
3/11
Rushing out the door to make our 10:30 tour time, we learned that road work and traffic can have a significant impact on arrival times when there is only one road =. Thankfully, New Zealand’s people are as nice as their accents, and they were able to shift us to a later tour, affording us a chance for lunch at the Shire’s Rest before departing. The tour was amazing. The scenery is gorgeous even without the realization that you are walking through the Shire. We even learned a new behind the scenes fact! The orcs during the sacking of the shire images that blah sees in the blah are played by local firefighters to be able to handle any issues with lighting the Green Dragon Inn on fire! The highlight was definitely the newly opened hobbit hole interior. For the filming, the interior shots were all done on a stage, so this is just recreated for visitors to enjoy.
The exteriors were so detailed, and the flowers and plants were so curated!
Bilbo's home!
The most important room in a hobbit hole, the food larder!
Thankfully the ceilings weren't completely to scale, and were sized up to accommodate human visitors.
Always important to mark the exits to a hobbit hole!
3/12-13
3/12:
A low key day enjoying the beauty of lake Taupo was slightly disrupted by having no power for most of the day.
3/13:
A large draw for the Taupo area is the volcanic activity. While we had seen the small hot pools around the edge of lake Taupo (actually a crater lake in the caldera of Taupo volcano), we wanted to see more of the volcanic geology up close. The fact that Mount Doom and Gollum’s falls were also at the Tongariro national park was purely a happy accident and not at all meticulously planned out.
Short hikes up to a ridge, by a river, and down to some small falls offered wildly different, though all beautiful, views. For not the first time in our world travels, we saw a class of students being brought to one of the places we had traveled so far to see. I can’t help but have some envy for having these cultural and geological marvels so close without having had to ship them to local museums as in the states.
While we didn’t see any kiwis, they are mostly nocturnal, we did learn about their plight at the visitor center. Something like 80% of kiwi chicks are dead within a year of leaving the nest. Most of this comes from invasive species such as stoats (originally brought in to farm for their pelts) and rats (I’m assuming stowaways). New Zealand takes its biodiversity seriously though, and they are spending millions of dollars a year working on removing these invasive species, with the goal of being rat/stoat free by 2070. The only indigenous mammals to New Zealand are actually bats!
Lake Taupo is actually in the caldera of a MASSIVE volcano. The mountains in the distance are more, ordinary sized volcanoes.
An interesting (if not entirely predictable) observation we have made is how different forests and foliage feel around the world.
Beautiful waterfall AND Gollum's pools, two for one!
Best road sign of the trip, not close
We think that is mount Doom in the background, but it could have been one of the many other mountains in the park.
3/14
On our last full day in Taupo we went to see Huka falls. A short hike from a higher vantage point down to the falls was full of Tui. As we approached the falls, the first evidence we had was the sound, which approached further out from sighting it than expected. Huka falls is one of the highest flow rate waterfalls in the world. The water through it fills an olympic sized swimming pool, every 10 seconds, 24/7/365. (Fun fact, when googling this, apparently “olympic-sized” is not a specific size, but an approximate one).
After a short hike back and a glass of wine looking out over the lake, we got a closer look in a boat tour of the lake. The highlight of the tour was a massive Maori carving, which was quite the spectacle though only 45 years old.
That night we packed up the house and prepared for our drive down the island.
While we heard many Tui, only some were visible among the branches.
Technically this is the rapids before the falls, but the sound and view were impressive.
We did not partake, but there were motorboat tours to the base of the falls.
