Well, I'm Back From a Hole in the Ground

~ January 23, 2003 ~

Dear 13-year old me,

Sometime in the next two weeks, you're going to pass a man in the mall in Corner Brook with a cane. He's going to drop a pack of cigarettes, and you're going to bend over and pick them up for him. This is the only time you'll see him for 8 years, and this is your only chance to stop him before he comes up with the robots that will take over us all.

Naw, I'm just screwing with you. The future is cool, we use time travel to do stupid gimmicky things like this.

But anyway, the reason I'm writing to you is to reassure you that things work out. I mean . . . ok, you don't get a whole lot taller. Or better at sports. Or with girls. But hey, the guitar . . . no, that skill has pretty much peaked too. But forget all that stuff. Because in ten years, you'll go to Hobbiton, and if you think you'd like that now, imagine how much you will when you're me.

Sincerely,

Me (you)

P.S. Invent Facebook

It was an early start this morning, driving over the winding and hilly Kaimai Range to the green rolling hills of the Waikato. This is picturesque farm country, dairy and sheep, with wide stretches of open land. An early morning sun was shining on Hobbiton, just outside of Matamata and about 45 minutes from Tauranga.

Let's step back for a minute. Back in 1998, when Peter Jackson and the b'ys were scouting for locations for The Lord of the Rings, they flew over the Alexander family's 1250 acre farm, and the first thing they saw was a lake in the middle of a ring of hills, with a massive 100-year-old tree right alongside of it. It was because of the perfect, natural positioning of the Party Tree (or, as it is now aptly nicknamed, the Money Tree) that they ended up leasing this part of the farm from the family, building a mill, a bridge, a brick pub, and 37 Hobbit holes in the hillsides. New Zealand pretty much is Middle-earth, from the fields of Canterbury doubling as Rohan to the volcanic Mount Ngauruhoe (not far from here) as Mount Doom, but the only actual set that remained after the filming of the movies was the village of Hobbiton. Even this spot started as a temporary set, but after The Hobbit was filmed here in 2011, it remained a permanent fixture. People wanted to see Bag End and where the rest of the hobbits hung out, and it turned into a pretty good business venture – the farm around the set is still active, but every 15 minutes a bus load of people are brought around to get their pictures taken in front of Bilbo's house. I went first thing in the morning, and managed to get on a modest-sized tour, but every one after ours was full to the brim. At peak time, around Christmas, the tour group had to deal with some 1500 people every day.

Step back another minute. I really, really wanted to go to Hobbiton – I think I've read one of the books in an airport terminal once, but I can't really remember what they're about. By which I mean to say that I could probably write out all the words to Tom Bombadil's songs if I really tried. 

Seriously? I should have at least tried basketball, I never had to get that good at it . . .

Ok, back to New Zealand.

We started by leaving the main farm road (Buckland Road, which as far as I know has no intentional connection to Tolkien's world) and driving in over a private 1.5 km dirt road, specially built by the New Zealand army before filming. As we went along, passing by the boring stuff like the field where make-up tents and catering tables used to be, the bus driver came on the speaker and said that we'd soon get our first view of the mill by the river.

“Pffff no we won't, there's no way I'm really – oh, wait, there it is. Well, I can admit to having those smuggled apricots in my pack and get myself deported, I'm good now.”

The bus unloaded at a gravel cul-de-sac, right by that high narrow part in the hedge where the hobbits make their return from Gondor with some serious swag in The Return of the King (if you're reading this and didn't know that the hobbits make it back alright, don't ever tell me). The village opens up from there, doing a decent circuit around the lake. One of the cool things is the way that the paintings of the sign posts (pointing out which of the four Farthings you're in, obviously), doors, and around the gardens have been made to look lived in, like the village has been here for ages. The tree on top of Bag End was originally brought in from the nearby area in hacked-up pieces, and reassembled like the least fun jigsaw puzzle in the world; Peter Jackson was apparently a real stickler for details, because when it came time to reconstruct the permanent set for The Hobbit trilogy, he had a tree specially made to look identical to this tree (that maybe gets 20 seconds of air time), except that it had to be 60 years younger to fit with the prequel timeline. But, when you've got the millions of dollars the studio is throwing at you (and a legion of fans who will notice these things), you can afford to do things correctly. Right now, the set has several full-time gardeners and maintenance crew, and I don't say they have many idle days.

You're not allowed to touch any of the set materials, but you can get a good up-close view of the holes, most of them being small (for longer shots), but the scattered one that is full size, to create the right movie magic sense of perspective. Up the hill, which gives a wicked view of the lake, the mill, and the surrounding fields (there was only one non-hobbit building visible during filming, and they painted the roof to make it look like a tree), there was one house we were allowed to step into, which just leads to a bare wooden room. All of the interior shots were done in Weta Studios, down in Wellington.

But, we still got to visit Frodo and Bilbo's iconic house at Bag End. And it's here that I have to make a pretty painful, embarrassing confession: I learned something today. Remember that scene where Gandalf and Bilbo are out smoking their pipes facing the sunset over the Shire, right before Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday? Well, Bag End faces due east in real life; they didn't use any special effects though, they just filmed that scene at sunrise and made sure not to linger on the sun actually coming up over the hill, instead of down. Fun fact. 

The tour wound down by the grassy field near the Party Tree, where we found out that during the party scene they served a very low percent, specially-made beer, so that the cast would get caught up in the onscreen revelries but not start slurring their words. 

Once we crossed the stone bridge by the mill (passing Sam's house first, the yellow-doored hole that fills the screen for the final shot of the films), we came to the stone terrace of the Green Dragon Pub, where we got to try some of the slightly stronger beer that is, nonetheless, totally unique to Hobbiton. Seems like a fitting spot to end a visit to the heart of the Shire.

A lot of fanatics have gone through Hobbiton: apparently there was one couple where the wife didn't speak any English, so the husband translated for her. In Elfish. So, I'm able to comfortably put myself somewhere farther down the scale than that, but today was still a pretty major check mark on the ol' bucketlist. Plus, mulling about the Shire and then watching it slip behind the farm hills is almost the perfect metaphor for this trip, trading comfort and absolutes for some wild pursuit to the other end of the globe.

“Home is behind, the world ahead,

And there are many paths to tread.

Through shadows to the edge of night,

Until the stars are all alight

Then world behind and home ahead,

We'll wander back to home and bed.”

It'll be a there and back again kind of adventure I'm sure, but I'm only getting started yet.

Cheers,

rb