Geysers, Zorbing and Hobbiton

After a bit of shopping and touring around in Wellington, the next stop on the North Island was Rotorua. The whole area is geo thermally active so that when you look at say a park or even a schoolyard in town, an area of bushes and trees will be fenced off and steam will be rising up from the ground. Depending upon the wind direction, you can usually get a whiff of sulphur in the air, even inside the hotel. There are a number of large Thermal PowerStation’s scattered around the countryside as well.
We visited the Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland to have a closer look at the Lady Knox geyser which was discovered just over 100 years ago. Here is a picture of the geyser going off at 10:15am, right on schedule.

In the park you can walk right up to and even stand inside the hot steam and sections of the water are bubbling away right beside you. The smell isn’t the most pleasant (or is that just that I have been using the same hiking boots for 3 months).




Here is the champagne pool with the multicoloured artists palette pool in front. All the colours are from the various minerals contained in the water which includes gold and silver.




In the afternoon we decided to try something we had never done and was invented in New Zealand… Zorbing!! We dove (ya like superman) into a clear plastic ball, with some warm water inside and were shoved down basically a ski hill! Here you can see the two of us flopping around inside the huge ball, bouncing down the hill.




At the bottom of the hill they unzipped the door and we looked like drowned rats, but it was a lot of fun!


The next day we drove out to Hobbiton (in Matamata), which is the site that Peter Jackson chose to film the Hobbit scenes in Lord of the Rings. The site was and still is a sheep farm so they gave a sheep shearing demonstration.



Jude also got to feed some of the lambs running around the farm.





Some of the original burrows used in the movie remain and the tour describes to what extent they would go in order to remain true to the Tolkien books. Here is a view looking up the hill with the Hobbit houses in view, minus the flowers, paint and hedges that were in the original movie.



We are sitting in front of Bags End where Bilbo lived and where a number of scenes were shot. In the movie there was an oak tree overhanging this house because it was described in the book. Since the location did not have a huge tree over this spot they cut one into pieces and put it back together including attaching by hand thousands of oak leaves and branches for just 30 seconds of time in the movie!


I always knew that Jude had me in the palm of her hand…..but I didn't think she could turn me into a hobbit!




Tomorrow we continue heading north up the North Island to the subtropical Bay of Islands area and then we will head south to the largest city in New Zealand, Auckland.