Hobbiton
March 16
March 16 may have been one day after Philip's birthday but for him this was the day he had been waiting for for a long time... we were going to visit the Hobbiton Filmset!
Philip is a big Lord of the Rings Fan and his first succefull website was about Lord of the Rings. According to him his entire future has been pretty much shaped by the Lord of the Rings. The websites thought his how to create websites and how to commerically run and grow them. This knowledge enabled him to quit his job at Accenture, start Maxlifestyle.net and eventually move to the Philippines and open a development center there. Soon after he met Nona and now of course we are married and living in the Philippines... you might say it all started with Lord of the Rings....
We left Pahia really earning that morning since we knew we had a very long drive to go. We were not sure what time we would make it back to Auckland and if we would be able to stop along the way to visit the Hobbiton filmset. Luckily we were really fast and were able to reach Auckland around noon. So from Auckland we re-routed and drove to Matamata. It is a small town but it became 'world famous' because a farm right outside the small town was chosen as the filmset for the Shire and Hobbiton. This even has changed the entire town as it now draws quite some tourists that sign up for the guided tours that take you to the filmset. The tours are the only way to see the set as there are no private visits allowed.
The tour was a lot of fun! The guides know everything there is to know about the movies and how they were shot. Unfortunately almost all the props were removed so all that is left is the landscape and the basic hobbit holes. Still it is enough to make it quite exciting to be there. We took a lot of pictures and Philip did some Frodo, Bilbo and Gollum imitations which we taped... no shame there! There were quite a lot of other tourist on the same tour and they were from all over the world. Some serious Tolkien Fans, others were just curious tourists.
After the film set tour we went to a sheep farm where we got a sheep sheering demonstration. We were first allowed to feed the adult sheep and then we got a presentation about the sheep farming business in New Zealand. Turns out there are 4 million New Zealanders and 60 million sheep... that is 15 sheep to every human being. Apparently sheep sheering is also a sport and a lot of young guys get into the busines just for the sport. A very strongly built guy then dragged out a sheep and started sheering it... quite a site. After doing one slowly he said he was going to do one in a minute and a half which is a pretty good speed for any respectable sheep sheerer. He made it was everyone was real impressed. After that Nona got a milk bottle and she got to feed the lamb. All in all a great fun day worth remembering!
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Honeymoon Destinations
These are the locations we visited during our honeymoon:
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