See all of our photos of our adventure to Hobbiton Movie Set from Tauranga New Zealand.
Today we rented a car so we could visit the Hobbiton Movie Set in Matamata New Zealand. It was about an hour drive from Tauranga. On our way, we stopped at McLaren Falls. There were wild hydrangea flowers everywhere.
We continued our journey to the town of Matamata which is about 10 minutes away from the movie set. They have embraced the movies and their visitor center is a Hobbit Hole.
The Hobbiton Movie Set is on a 1250 acre working sheep and cattle farm. The actual set sits on about 12.5 acres. Be sure to look at the photo album for all the pictures, this is only a small sample. We started from a visitor center/parking area on the edge of the farm and were bussed about 10 minutes to the actual movie set. Our guided tour began with walking through different areas to view some of the 44 Hobbit Hole houses on the set. While they all have working doors, most are just facades that end about 3 feet inside.
To enhance the tour, they have created two full hobbit homes to walk through. They broke our tour group into two groups and one group toured one home and the other group the other home so keep it from being so crowded.
After this we walked down the hill and past the mill and were given a complimentary beverage, Ken a stout and Karen a hard cider, at the Green Dragon
We drove back to the ship. This was one of our best days so far.