There and back again

This is yesterday's post. We were way too tired at the end of the day to write, so I (Grant) am writing today. We'll post about what we did today soon.

Today we had a very eventful day. We said goodbye to Auckland (for about 45 minutes in gridlock morning traffic) and headed toward Rotorua. Thanks to our friend TomTom we arrived at our first destination, Waitomo Caves, despite taking a sheep road to get there. The main attraction of the caves are the gloworms that live in them on the ceilings. The worms have little lights on their tails that they use to attract insects into strings hanging down from them that I'm guessing are sticky like a spider's web.

Gloworm Caves. We weren't allowed to take pictures so here is a picture of the advertisement.

It was neat to see. It was like looking up into the stars at night, except there weren't any city lights. At the end they take you on a very short boat ride out of the cave with a final viewing of the glow worms. After we were finished we ate a picnic lunch with some deli meat, bread, cheese and chips. The food prices over here are a lot higher so we've been buying food at the supermarkets to save money. After the caves we hit the road again on our way to Middle-Earth, in particular Hobbiton.

We stopped during the trip to Hobbiton to take this picture. The landscape was very beautiful. New Zealand can change very quickly as we drove through rainforest suddenly and came out later to these beautiful hills and valleys.

Us in front of Bag End!

We thought Hobbiton would be quite interesting, but it turned out to be quite a bit more fun than we thought it would. There were dozens of hobbit holes. Most of them don't even open up inside. The sheep farmer who owns the ground they wanted to use for the movie essentially paid for the set with the generous profits he made letting them use his land - it was an afterthought when people kept coming to his house asking to see the set before they tore it all down. Otherwise it wouldn't still exist.....except that they are coming out with the first Hobbit movie in December so it would have been rebuilt for that. Despite all the money and effort put into this, only a few minutes of the movies were actually filmed there.

We also got a lesson in special effects. I'm officially a hobbit for this one.

(Cindy says that I'm her little hobbit hubby!)

We finished up at Hobbiton and made our way to Rotorua to check into our hotel. The remainder of the evening was spent walking to the supermarket and soaking in pool at the hotel which happened to be filled with mineral water from a geothermal well. Try everything once even if it is full of weird metals and isn't completely clear. A lot of people in Rotorua invest a lot up front to get free geothermal energy from all the activity in the area.

Love, the George family