Hobbit Town

Monday 12^th July, 12.30pm

I went to Hobbiton yesterday.

You know: Hobbiton, The Shire, Middle Earth ... New Zealand.

They made us sign this privacy document though, so basically the only picture I can post up is this:

Lame-o.

The tour was pretty cool though, despite the lack of evidence. Peter Jackson & co. had to tear down the entire set after they finished filming Lord of the Rings, but now that The Hobbit is being made, they’ve started to recreate the village. And because we went on a Sunday, there was no construction going on, so we could go right up and explore the Hobbit holes.

I think my favourite part of the tour was realising that the detail in this place is so great that the tiny splotches of lichen on the Hobbit hole entrances in the films – that you’d have to be a Supermaniac to notice – are, in fact, painstakingly painted on. With a paintbrush. And with actual, like, green paint.

I’ll possibly be complaining less about making those piss-easy architectural models in the future.

We went to this place called Rotorua yesterday too. I’ll let you look it up yourself to see what an awesome freaky town it is (possibly because there are three people sitting around me being forced to read trashy magazines while I finish this). It lies on a volcanic fault line, and the entire area lies in constant threat of well, being blown up. Plus it has bubbling hot mud pools all over the place (that remind me of that scene in Dante’s Peak where the couple goes for a swim in the forest and gets burned alive) – pretty cool. Or not cool, rather. (See what I did there with the double entendre?)

So that’s it.

We leave for San Francisco tonight!