home : profile : portfolio : features: services   

 

 Home > Features > Journey to Middle Earth...page1

 
 
     
   
   
   
 
 
   
 
 
“May I have some water please?”

Here I was, thirty thousand feet in the air and suffering from dehydration. Good thing a minute later the stewardess was back with a pitcher of ice water with lemon slices. As the credits from the second full length movie started to roll I glanced at my watch to see how long we had been flying. We had flown into the night and my body was quite stiff from the long hours of sitting. A couple of hours more and it’s touch down at Auckland.

I was taking a journey to Middle Earth with a Lord of the Rings Tour which interestingly began on this plane. Not only were we flying Air New Zealand, “THE airline to middle earth”, we were also on “Aragorn”, one of only four aircrafts to bear the Lord of the Rings design. The others being...Frodo, Eowyn/Arwen and Legolas.

Overall the flight was great and we were in Auckland at around 6am, four hours ahead of the time in Manila. Temperature was nice and nippy at around 10°C.

The largest city in the entire New Zealand, Auckland is home to about 1.3 million people. It’s Sky Tower, the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere gave us a good panoramic view of the city of Auckland. One can opt to get some extreme thrill by jumping and free falling off the top of the tower or be content to watch from the observation deck braver souls jumping off the building. One can also walk across the glass floors while looking straight down at the ground below.

I met my first OFW during breakfast the next day, a waitress at the hotel coffee shop. Being the news person that I am, I got her contact details just in case we needed a stringer from this part of the world. We discussed politics briefly before we headed off to the bus for our first official day on tour.

Our first stop was the town of Matamata, the site for Hobbiton. Though New Line Cinema took down all the sets after filming the three movies, they fortunately left the hobbit holes intact.

A guided tour from the town center took us to a hilly area tucked within the Alexander Sheep farm where the Shire was brought to life. No imagination was required to envision Bagshot Row and Bag End in all its glory. As we stroll through Hobbiton our guide explains where and how the set was built through photo boards which showed how the area looked like during filming. We visit the party tree with confetti from Bilbo Baggins’ birthday party still stuck in the branches. This centuries year old tree which grows by a small lake was the only reason why Peter Jackson selected this area for Hobbiton; they say it matches exactly the way Tolkien described it in his books. We walk by Sam Gamgee’s house before heading up to most famous hobbit hole in Middle-earth, Bilbo’s mansion. I took about 100 photographs in Hobbiton but aside from those digital memories I took along as a keepsake a pine cone from the party tree.
 
 

>>continue to next page

  
     
 

Links | Contact | Site Map | Search   

v1.0 updated 21-May-2004   

©MichaelJosh.com 2001