Saturday 27th January – Busiest tourism day ever! – Rotorua

This has got to have been one of the most hectic days of tourism experienced by anyone anywhere in the world ever, so brace yourselves! Note there will be many photos of us wearing the same outfits, but remember, it was still the SAME DAY!

Me at the entrance to the Maori village

We left the campsite at 930am and drove straight to the Whakarewarewa living Maori village.  The VC had tipped us off that for only $40 each we could get an hours guided tour, seats for a tribal performance and access to watch a very active geyser.  However, the 10am walk and 1115am performance were full so we went and got takeaway coffees to go and watch the geyser performing. We must have timed it right as the geyser only goes fully ‘off’ once every hour or so but is unpredictable, so we were lucky to see it.  

Couple of shots of the geyser going OFF!

We went to meet up with our walking tour at 11am, with our very ‘singy’ local guide (below).   

Apparently the name in red is the village's full name.  We had to say it out loud together.  We could have been saying anything!

She could’ve been singing about absolutely anything but seemed genuine in welcoming us into the village. As we crossed the bridge into the village, the tribe’s children were shouting up at us from the river below.  Before the bridge was built locals used to charge visitors a penny to carry them across the water.  Now that the bridge is there, the children are called ‘penny divers’ asking for coins to be thrown into the river for them for pocket money in place of being able to provide this service:

The Tupuna Whare ancestral meeting house where all births, deaths and marriages are celebrated - outside and (below) inside

There is geothermal activity everywhere in the village and they use this heat and water in as many ingenious ways as possible – washing, cooking and heating their homes.  Some families had to be evacuated from their homes due to water and steam blasting through the floor! This photo shows corn on the cobs being boiled in the natural hot springs:

This is their bathing system – note the channels that filter the warm water from the natural springs into the tubs.

We returned to view the geysers, this time with the group, but initially they weren’t playing ball, so we hung around until they started spouting again.

Then it was on to get seats for our Cultural experience.  One of the ladies introduced the show, explaining the meaning behind the various dances, games and songs before it commenced.

Those are some scary eyes!

 And afterwards there was a photo opportunity with the performers:

I couldn't quite get the downward turning mouth thing right....

This is Ruru the morepork owl

We had lunch on the go as we moved on to our next point of interest of the day - Wingspan Raptor Centre.  Simon can be credited with finding this one.  They have existed since 1994, rehabilitating injured indigenous raptors and also monitoring numbers of the New Zealand Falcon, a priority threatened species.  It was their last day of opening before moving to newer, larger premises.  For this reason, they were not flying the birds today but a falconer let us feed one of their endangered Native New Zealand Falcons, Hisan.

I took this photo to show the ridges in this falcon's mouth that help it eat its prey

Me with Hisan

Si with Hisan

I'd love to claim I'd taken this photo but I can't - amazing though, isn't it?

Fun fact for you - a falcon from this sanctuary called Atareta was the actual one used as a model for the artist that drew the falcon on the NZ $20 bill, so she's almost as famous as the Queen!  Here's a $20 to prove it:

We had a one-hour drive on to our next tour in Hobbiton.  For those who let the whole ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Hobbit’ thing pass them by, I’ll explain. When scene researchers for the first film trilogy flew over the lush green rolling hills of the Waikato region in north New Zealand they thought it would perfectly represent ‘the shire’, the home of the Hobbits, the friendly little people with massive hairy feet!  The crew approached the Alexander family who owned a sheep farm in the region, a contract was signed and hey presto, Hobbiton was born.  Following the success of the films the set has been preserved for fans to visit and witness the magic first-hand.  The tours sell out well in advance and we made sure we were there early for our tour, to be able to have a coffee first in the Shire’s Rest:

At our allotted time our group was loaded onto an air-conditioned bus to be transferred over to the movie set.  You can’t fail to be inspired by the beauty of the landscape as you are driven in: 

The Alexanders' sheep farm

This hobbit hole is small, for far away shots

Once there, we were taken on a walking tour of the 12-acre set by our guide who furnished us with interesting behind-the-scenes facts and some awful, awful hobbit-based jokes.  I will not inflict any on you. 

At our first stop, it was explained to us that the hobbit holes on site are built to differing scales.  This makes perfect movie-magic sense when you think of it.  To make the normal sized actors appear hobbit-sized when they’re standing in front of their front door, the set needs to be over-sized.  For wider, shorter shots, they needed smaller hobbit-holes.

Medium-sized hobbit hole

This is the vegetable patch at the bottom of the hill that Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) runs through shouting 'I'm going on an adventure!' in The Hobbit

They employ full-time gardeners to keep the grounds looking perfect and the attention to detail is stunning.  Most of the scenery here is naturally grown and nurtured.  Apart from this tree above Bilbo Baggin’s hole (if you'll pardon the expression?!).  

Bilbo Baggin's hobbit hole with fake oak tree

No admittance.... except on party business of course.

For the Rings films, a 26-ton oak tree was cut down and transported here and had over 200,000 individual vinyl leaves wired individually onto the branches.  When it came to the Hobbit movies, set earlier chronologically, the tree needed to be smaller so this one is entirely man-made - this time with over 376,000 hand-painted leaves!  The tree appears in the Hobbit for about 20 seconds! Worth every penny I’m sure… 

The mill on the Shire

It's official, we are way too big to be hobbitses...

The tour took time for everyone to filter through and get their photos taken in front of all of the important points, before it concluded in the correct fashion – at the Green Dragon Inn for a drink. Then it was all aboard the bus back to the main car park to be re-united with our vehicles.

Outside and inside The Green Dragon

We had no time to lose, needing to do the return journey to Rotorua to go and make our luge slot for the evening!  It was just about light when we caught the gondola up the mountain. 

The view back down to Rotorua and Rotorua lake

We went and found a couple of helmets with GoPro fittings so that we could capture the excitement ourselves, here we are in the queue.  

And that was the problem.  It seemed that everyone who had to cancel due to the bad weather last night was here, along with all of the Saturday night customers.  It was rammed and we all had to go through the longest queue first where we were shown how to use the luges safely before we could skip the ‘training’ queue. 

There was originally a choice of three different tracks to descend, from beginner through to advanced, so obviously we went for the beginner one first.  They closed the intermediate one for some reason, so we were down to a choice of two.  We took some awesome video, but at a few minutes long each, they aren’t going to make it onto this blog, but here's a little taster clip for you:

But let’s just say, you could build up an impressive turn of speed on these things and health and safety seemed to be of minor concern.  It was great fun! It was especially great in the dark, with different coloured lights and even dinosaurs on the beginner track, which also gave you the longest ride because it was the ‘slowest’, apparently. We managed to do some sneaky overtaking manoeuvres around some of the slower participants and have a decent race down. There were a lot of adults behaving like very big kids, and of course I’m including us in that!  We were worried that the long queues would not give us enough time to get all of our five runs in but Skyline agreed to keep the luge tracks open late to allow for the delays.  This meant that it was gone 11pm by the time we’d finished and ridden the gondola back down the mountain:

What a day! We headed back to Cosy Cottage, trying to remember everything we had done in the last twelve hours.