As I left Rotorua, I was on a tour to visit the Hobbiton movie set. I caught my shuttle into downtown Rotorua and checked in for the tour at the Hobbiton Shop and that’s also where you pick up the tour bus to Hobbiton, about 45 minutes outside of Rotorua.

On the bus ride to Hobbiton we watched several videos explaining how this location was discovered, the arrangements with the owners of the property, building the sets for Lord of the Rings, the tourist interest in visiting the sets and then the rebuilding of sets for The Hobbit movies and the tourist attraction.

In 2008, director Peter Jackson was looking for the perfect place for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They flew over the Waikato region, the most expensive farm land in the country and found the farmland that suited their needs. The owner of the farm has 1200+ acres of land and agreed to allow the creation of The Shire here.

For the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Shire hobbit houses were made of polystyrene. At the end of filming, the crews left, the movie was released and the owners of the land started getting a lot of interest for tours of the set. The roads weren’t paved and it wasn’t set up for the influx of visitors but even with that, they ended up having over one million visitors a year. When Peter Jackson came back to ask about filming The Hobbit trilogy, the owner asked if they could build the set as permanent structures and to help turn it into a tourism venue. Construction started and all hobbit houses are made from natural materials: wood, brick, stucco, slate roofs, real plants (instead of plastic…one exception being the tree growing on top of Bilbo Baggins’s home). The Shire consists of 44 hobbit houses and, of course, The Green Dragon Pub! It really is a magical place and worth the tour if you’re a fan or maybe even if you aren’t.

The roles of hobbit ‘extras’ in the movies were filled mostly by local residents. The requirements: 5’4″ or shorter, round face, round body, mischief in the eyes and a sense of being a hobbit. There were lots of stories of local parents coming to the auditions to support their adult children who were auditioning and it ended up that the parents got cast but their kids didn’t.

And here’s Bilbo’s house:

For filming purposes, distinguishing the very tall Gandolf from the very short hobbits, they use various perspective tricks. Some of the hobbit houses are built to 90% average human height and some are at 60%. Jackson used lots of illusionary tricks to help with the perspective.

We made or way through The Shire to to the Green Dragon.

And now the end of the tour: The Green Dragon, a mug of stout served up by Meghan our tour guide, a cheese scone and a warm fire with friends (some fellow hobbits from North Carolina and Tennessee), a perfect end to this 4- day tour of central North Island.