New Zealand's North Island: Hobbiton and the Waitomo Glowworm Caves

For the final stop of our journey through Oceania, we reached New Zealand’s North Island. To be honest, our original plan was simply to enjoy the country’s pastoral scenery, and the South Island seemed sufficient. Yet every flight from the South Island back to the United States required a connection on the North Island, and the connection times were uniformly dreadful. Since we were going to be there anyway, we might as well…

We searched online for things to do on the North Island and discovered Hobbiton. It had served as a filming location for several movies in The Lord of the Rings series and looked well worth visiting.

I had seen every film in The Lord of the Rings series, including the later Hobbit films. I was not a devoted fan, however, and could no longer remember many of the classic scenes. That did not matter. No knowledge of the films was necessary; the village itself had enough character to justify the visit.

The first thing we encountered at the entrance was a life-size Gandalf. Many of the people waiting to enter stopped for a photograph with him.

The site organized guided tours in several languages. English tours were plainly the most frequent and could generally be booked at almost any time, while tours in other languages were harder to secure. Chinese tours were especially difficult: demand was high and departures were limited. We did manage to book one. Had we ended up on an English tour, the guide might have started making jokes about the films while we stood there understanding the words but none of the references.

The first sight upon entering the village was its sign.

Then we entered the village itself. Visitors could often be seen striking all manner of strange poses for photographs—for example, launching into an enormous leap on an otherwise unremarkable path. No great powers of deduction were needed to realize that they were recreating scenes from the films.

It was a thoroughly developed attraction, except that my phone had no signal at all and could only use the local Wi-Fi. My location-tagged WeChat Moments post very nearly failed to make it out of Hobbiton.

Afterward, we visited the Waitomo Glowworm Caves. A guide took us into the cave aboard a small boat, and overhead the rocky ceiling was covered with points of light from the glowworms. It was an unusual and memorable experience. The photographs, however, were another matter. The lights were so small that the results looked little different from pointing a camera at the night sky, and were simply not worth showing here. As an aside, these “glowworms” are not fireflies in the usual sense, but the luminous larvae of an insect.

That completed the day we had arranged around our Auckland connection. With it, our journey through Oceania came to an end.