Bay Of Plenty The Hobbiton Movie Set – Becoming Kiwi Day 3
This was one of our most anticipated days of the trip, as we had booked the evening banquet tour at the Hobbiton Movie Set. In the morning we slept in until about 10am and took our time getting ourselves ready to head out. As we were leaving we ran into our AirBnB host Pete, and he gave us a little tour and a whole bunch of information about his Kiwifruit farm. They grow the Golden Kiwi Fruit, which is different than the green ones we are used to back home. These ones taste and look different, and hardly have any fuzz!
After leaving our AirBnB we made our way into Tauranga – the largest urban centre in the Bay Of Plenty – and decide to walk around the Mauao Historic Reserve at the base of Mount Maunganui.
We spent about 45 minutes walking around the base, and when we finished we grabbed an ice cream cone, a spot on the beach and chilled for a little while before we decide to go forage for some food.
Tauranga beach
After eating our ice cream, we made our way out of the city towards the Mills Reef Winery & Vineyard for a late lunch and glass of wine.
After lunch we headed out to Matamata for the Hobbiton Movie Set Tour!
It is a fantastic tour – although the magicness of it all was lost on the few people who had never read the books or seen the movies. Our tour group had around 40 people and was the evening Banquet tour, which includes a full Hobbit-esque dinner at the Green Dragon Inn! It started out a little cloudy, but as the tour continued, the weather steadily improved and gave us a wonderful sunset.
These are the only two pictures from Hobbiton we’re going to share with you today 🙂
We took so many pictures while we were there, we thought we would do a separate post so we could include more images. Stay tuned for the next post, which will include all the pictures from the tour!
You can see the rest of our trip here:
