On the Hobbit trail in New Zealand

With the film of The Hobbit due out next month, New Zealand is preparing to welcome a fresh wave of visitors keen to follow in Bilbo's hairy footsteps around Middle Earth

Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf on the Hobbiton set near Matamata on New Zealand's North Island 

There are three stories you'll hear about The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand. The first is the tale of a wealthy man, a Tolkien fan from the US, who asked the makers of the movies' One Ring to come up with a costly gold replica, then hired a helicopter to fly him over Mount Doom, where he threw it into the flaming inferno. At least, that's how they tell it in Wellington. In Nelson, it's a woman, a spurned lover, who threw her One Ring wedding band into the mouth of the volcano. Then there's the story of the six-foot-three German tourist who arrived at Hobbiton dressed as, well, a very tall hobbit, who felt so at home in one of the hobbit holes there that he squashed himself into it and refused to leave for 12 hours. In Auckland, they'll tell you he was Belgian.

The Lord of the Rings has been big business in New Zealand ever since Wellington-born director Peter Jackson decided to film his trilogy here, back in the late 1990s. Now, with the imminent release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – the first instalment in the new movie trilogy spun from the far shorter book – there's another opportunity to attract Tolkien devotees.

People involved with Middle Earth-related tours talk wearily of copyright back-and-forths with the Tolkien estate and with New Line Cinema; it was, initially, hard for them to market anything local as an official Lord of the Rings experience. There's very much a sense that the tourism which followed the films' release took all parties by surprise, and they're preparing for it properly this time.

The biggest name in the game right now is Hobbiton, a sheep farm that doubled as the Shire for both trilogies. It's about two hours' drive from Auckland, near Matamata; stop in any of the creaking cafes in the small towns along the way ("Collect your Hot Mail here!" reads the proud sign on one) and you'll bump into a minibus full of pilgrims on the same journey. If you're very lucky, one of the lesser-spotted costumed devotees may make an appearance, though on a brisk early spring day, you need more than just a cloak to keep you warm, so we didn't spy any Gandalfs.

Jackson's location scouts saw potential in Alexander Farm's rolling green hills, lake, and, crucially, large pines – one of which would eventually become Bilbo's party tree. After filming was completed in 2004, the set was dismantled, before anyone realised that a massive opportunity had been missed. When it was rebuilt for The Hobbit, the farm fought to keep its hobbit holes.

The artwork on the sides of the mini-buses that take people down to the main site still bear the scars of its cobbled-together past. The post-LOTR hobbit holes resembled a Changing Rooms project gone bad, with plain MDF facades fronting holes to nowhere, and though those early visitors may have been disappointed, they did get the option of feeding lambs at the end of the tour, a tradition that still stands today. Sure, you could survey a bit of grass where Elijah Wood once placed his hairy prosthetic feet, but in its original incarnation, these moments required Tolkien-esque powers of imagination.

These days it's far slicker operation, though there is a peculiar feeling to flying for 26 hours only to find yourself in a place that has been chosen for its resemblance to the Malvern Hills. Then there's the fact that the 37 hobbit holes vary greatly in size to accommodate the different heights of the actors playing hobbits and dwarves at any one time. Oh, and that oak tree that sits majestically above Bag End? Its plastic leaves, imported from Taiwan, blow off in the wind, and have to be replaced every year or so because visitors keep pinching them as souvenirs.

So while it may feel like you're taking a gentle stroll around a lusciously green film set, it can be quietly disorientating. Avoid going the day after you land, lest any remaining jetlag tip you over the edge. Perhaps that's what happened to the giant German/Belgian hobbit who claimed he had found his home here.

View of Hobbiton Village

Hobbiton may be the main event for now, but Wellington, on the southern tip of the North Island, is about to take over, renaming itself "The Middle of Middle Earth" at the end of November in time for the world premiere of The Hobbit. Back in September, there was little sign of the mania to come, though it already drew on its LOTR history. We spent an afternoon on a Lord of the Rings Movie Tours minibus, along with a couple of hardcore Tolkien fans, who made Hobbiton's gentle visitors look like pathetic amateurs.

It's a winding drive – as are most of them in the terminally bendy-roaded New Zealand – up to Mount Victoria, which is less of a mountain and more of a hill, but which hosted a number of the scenes set in the Hobbiton woods in The Fellowship of the Ring: its paths are marked by cute "hobbit-height" posts.

Our Movie Tours guide, Alice, had brought along a laptop, so we could view clips while standing on the very spot in which they were filmed. She also had props. I proudly reenacted a Sam and Frodo breakfast, a deleted scene restored to the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring (again, this is not for amateurs), complete with pipe and replica frying pan.

Next, we came to the hill down which the hobbits roll when they're on the run from Farmer Maggot. "Do you want to make a hobbit pile?" asked Alice.

"Go on then," we shrugged, preparing to throw ourselves on the floor. I looked over at the other couple on the tour with us, who, judging by their furrowed brows and the number of questions they were asking about the minutiae of the trilogy, were taking it rather more seriously than us. They stared back, appalled. We did not make a hobbit pile.

Mount Ngauruhoe, on the North Island, starred in the Mordor scenes.

I asked Alice if she'd been a fan of the movies before she took the job. "I wasn't," she admitted. "I know everything about them now, though."

This seems to be how it is in New Zealand. Everyone has taken up their Hobbity associations with enthusiasm, from the two mountains that stood in for Mount Doom – Mount Ngauruhoe and Mount Ruapehu, with additional help from scale models and CGI – to the small family-owned vineyard in Nelson, on the South Island, which won a licence to stick Middle Earth on the labels of its surprisingly delicious wines. You can hire a helicopter to fly out over more remote locations, or visit the gold and silversmith who made the One Ring for the movies.

You can't drive for more than an hour without somebody pointing out a waterfall that might have had Orlando Bloom underneath it or a restaurant that Sir Ian McKellen liked to have his dinner in. What's nice about it is that the famous laid-back New Zealand character is in the fabric of everything. It doesn't feel opportune so much as a country going along with something that happened to come its way.

One of Hobbiton Movie Set and Farm Tours homely Hobbit holes 

In fact, what may have been our most authentic Hobbit experience wasn't marketed as one at all. The Waitomo Caves, on the North Island, offer a series of "adventure options" that range from a leisurely underground stroll to look at glowworms to the Haggas Honking Holes challenge, which earns a maximum eight Rambo Points in the brochure. With hindsight, I would recommend you respect this points system, and not undertake an intensive caving experience thinking that mild claustrophobia and a fatal lack of upper body strength would be minor considerations.

The name refers to a hollow cavity deep underground that "honks" back at you when you put your head into it and shout, but it sounds like something straight out of the Shire. And at no point did I feel more like a plucky hobbit than the moment I emerged into the sunlight after two hours of abseiling into underground caverns, crawling through freezing streams on my belly and squashing myself through inhuman gaps in the walls. When Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves journey over the Misty Mountains, they shelter from a storm in a cave that turns out to be a goblin hotspot. As I peeled off my wetsuit and examined the bruises that were just starting to appear on my hands, I realised I would have done well to heed Tolkien's warning in chapter five: "That, of course, is the dangerous part about caves: you don't know how far they go back, sometimes, or where a passage behind may lead to, or what is waiting for you inside."

by Rebecca Nicholson - The Guardian, Friday 16 November 2012 22.44 GMT

Taken from HERE.