Tiff & Jared's adventures

Where has the time gone?! Somehow the end of 2018 approached us sneakily from behind. We made the best memories for the 2018 New Year’s Eve and 2019 New Year’s Day.

Waitomo

On December 31st, we drove to Waitomo. The town itself is super small (someone told us 53 residents), but it’s very well-known for its extensive cave systems with glow worms. We ended up booking I a tour with Glowing Adventures, a family run business that just opened its cave doors to the public in 2015. The farm has been in the the family for four generations, and they’re lucky enough to have a recognized cave system quite literally in their backyard. Before getting started, we were given a cave-worthy outfit to slip into and fitted for a helmet and boots. From there, we literally walked from their shed through the farm to get to a wooden stairway leading down to the opening of the cave. The guide asked us to walk around in the stream in order to get acquainted with how it would feel to walk through and over slippery, wet rocks. Soon, we were in the cave and out of the sunlight, using our headlamps to lead the way. We really enjoyed the tour because we felt as if we weren’t babied. We were expected to be able to clamber over limestone boulders and shimmy through narrow openings. At some points, we were on our hands and knees to get through some narrow openings. It was a little claustrophobic at first but once we got the hang of it, it was so fun! The guide took us through different sections of the cave, showing us stalactites and stalagmites, asking us to turn our lights off so we could experience total darkness, and leading us to where the glow worms were most populated.

Fun fact: the cave is so dark that your eyes will never adjust to see in front of you. I was waving my hand in front of my face within a few inches and couldn’t see it at all.

Now, I won’t go into the details of glowworms because I still don’t fully understand them. First off, they’re not actually worms but rather the larvae stage of some bug. The bioluminescent light they shine is used to attract prey – the prey unknowingly enters the cave then flies up towards the lights thinking they’re the stars in the night sky. Then… CHOMP. After the larvae hatch, they’re only alive for a few days to reproduce before they die. All very fascinating and all very gross, but nonetheless beautiful and mesmerizing. At another point of the cave, the guide asked us again to turn our lights off and gave us about ten minutes of complete darkness to appreciate the cave sky of lights. At the end of the tour, we walked back through the green forest and ascended the steps to the house where tea and cookies were awaiting us. We would definitely recommend this tour – it even came with pictures that the guide took of us!

We finished the tour around 4 and asked for recommendations as to any New Years plans. The locals basically said there’s nothing going on because the town was so small – there was only one bar downtown. Our guide did recommend the Riuwara Bush Walk for night time though. He said we should go after dark to see glow worms hanging on the cave walls for free. We decided to do this. To kill some time, we checked into our AirBnB and hung out for a few hours watching all the New Years tv recaps. The AirBnB stay was very nice; it was a farm-stay meaning that there were chickens walking around and fresh picked eggs in the fridge. We were warmly greeted by our host’s young black dog, who rolled over and immediately demanded belly rubs. 🐶

We made dinner, grabbed our headlamp and headed towards the bush walk. We were surprised to see a fair amount of cars in the carpark. By the time we got there, it was almost fully dark. Flashlights and headlamps in hand, we started walking the track and within minutes we saw hundreds of bioluminescent glowworms lining the open cave walls. These little buggers were too hard to capture well on camera, but it will stay in my memory the New Year’s Eve that we stayed up to look at glowworms. In my opinion, this was way better (for us and the environment) than any fireworks.

We made it back with just enough time to see the Auckland Skytower chime midnight and explode with fireworks 💥. Pretty cool being the first people to see the new year!

Matamata

The next morning, we woke up, ate some fresh hard boiled eggs and started the drive to Matamata for our Hobbiton tour. I was so excited for this tour!! For the original Lord of the Rings filming, the crew tour down the set once filming was over. When Sir Peter Jackson came back to film The Hobbit, they decided to build the Shire with permanent materials so that visitors could come and see the set where the magic happened. The tour started at the Matamata visitor center before getting to the Alexander family farm. Years ago when LOTR was first filmed, Jackson circled the countryside in a helicopter looking for the perfect spot to erect the Shire. He found a sheep farm and got the owner to agree to have a movie set built here. That same farm owner is now a 50 50 partner with Jackson over Hobbiton – pretty good deal eh?

Anyways, the tour itself was awesome. Granted, it was pretty crowded but Jared and I hung in the back so that we were able to take a bunch of pictures. We saw Bag End (Bilbo’s hobbit hole), Sam Wise’s home, the party tree, dozens of other hobbit holes and of course the Green Dragon Inn. The end of the tour landed us in the Inn and we got the choice of a complementary drink.

Fun facts:

While the crew spent hundreds, and probably thousands, of hours filming the Shire, there were only about thirty minutes seen of the Shire between all six LOTR and Hobbit films.

The tree above Bag End is fake. The original tree from LOTR had died and this tree was created. The tree included thousands of fake leaves woven onto it from Taiwan.

Most of the filming was done in Wellington. The hobbit holes only go a few feet in. All footage of the interior of the hobbit holes was done elsewhere. Furthermore, to exaggerate the difference in height between Gandalf and Bilbo/Frodo, the scenes had to be shot twice and joined together. In real life, the actors were all within a foot of each other but hobbits should only be about three and a half feet. The filming crew had to use a lot of creativity to account for all the height similarities among crew members.

When Bilbo Baggins’ actor was giving his birthday speech under the Party Tree, his “fake” birthday cake made out of styrofoam actually caught on fire during filming. He was doing such a good job during his speech that the crew decided to keep filming. Apparently, if you pay attention and actually look for it during the film, you can see his cake on fire in the background!

As fun and challenging as the caves were the day before, I think Hobbiton had it beat for me. It truly felt surreal being on the immortalized movie set of one of my favorite films!

We didn’t hang around Matamata much more because frankly, all it’s known for is Hobbiton. We headed east to our campground at McLaren Falls Park. It was a big regional park with swimming holes, waterfalls and lakes. We decided instead of hanging around to drive to the coast and see Mount Maunganui. Among the beautiful flat sandy beaches, there was a hill to the left that looked out of place. We ended up walking the boardwalk and getting some (delicious) ice cream before heading back to camp since the gates closed at 7:30. We ended up having a freeze-dried meal of cottage pie while facing the lake and feeding some ducks before going to bed.

The next morning, we started the drive to the Coromandel Peninsula. First stop was Cathedral Cave. It was a 45 minute hike before we wound up on the populated beach. Cathedral Cave ended up being a lot bigger than we expected; there was a huge hole in the rock that people walked through to get to the other section of the beach. We hung out on the beach for a wee bit and agreed it was probably the prettiest beach we’d been to. However, if you were looking for seclusion, you wouldn’t have found it here. We headed up the 45 minute return walk, stopped at The Pour House for a beer, and continued on north on the peninsula. Our campsite was at Port Jackson, on the upper section of Coromandel. While the mileage wasn’t long, we had to go through a large section of windy gravel road hugging the coastline. It was absolutely beautiful but lended itself to a rather long drive. Luckily, the crowds had thinned out up here and the beaches weren’t as busy. The campsite was right on the beach and there were families playing in the surf – the campsite was pretty full. We were pretty tired from the past few days (staying up for 2019 was a challenge) so we had a relaxing night at our tent and took a little walk on the beach.

Our trip to Port Jackson was quick as we had to drive back down the Coromandel Peninsula the next day. On the way to our next destination, we ended up getting a flat tire. In all of our travels and road trips, this was our first car trouble so we were feeling pretty lucky. Unluckily, we couldn’t find the jack in our rental car but a very amazingly nice local stopped over, asked if we were okay then proceeded to help us change the spare with his jack (I freaking love Kiwis). We stayed overnight in a small town just a handful of kilometers away – Ngatea – until a repair shop opened in the morning. Luckily, there was free camping behind the local library. The public restrooms were probably the coolest bathrooms we’d ever been into – there was a lock and unlock button along with a godly voice telling us how to use different parts of the bathroom.