Hakuna Matamata
Matamata and Waitomo, New Zealand
The drive to Matamata is beautiful, with curvy roads and foggy mountains in the distance. We park Marshmallow at Firth Tower Museum carpark and walk into town for some coffee to properly wake up, more gas for the stove, and then we get souvenirs and tickets for the Hobbiton Movie Set tour at Matamata I-Site.
We get on a big green bus that takes us to the Alexander Farm where we meet up with our tour guide Jan. She takes 36 of us around the set, which is absolutely stunning and quite recognizable, even for people like me, who can hardly say they’ve seen the movies. To be fair, I did watch (most of) The Hobbit on the plane here. We go through the village full of Hobbit Holes while Jan tells us facts about the movie set and what scenes have been filmed here. While taking pictures in front of one of the Hobbit holes, a Chinese guy who’s (presumably) with his wife carrying a bridal bouquet, asks me to be in a picture with him. “He loves your green hair,” says the wife, and I awkwardly reply “Thanks, it’s all natural”. Since everyone on the tour is behind us waiting in line, they have to wait until we’re done posing for an awkward picture of unlikely friends. At least they’re laughing.
Jan then takes us down to the Green Dragon, where we get a complimentary drink. Since we can’t choose, we get all of the drinks: a cider, a stout and an ale. The extra beer only sets us back $6.
20 minutes later we’ve downed our drinks and buy some more cider at the souvenir shop and then we’re on our way back to Matamata’s city center. By this point Craig and I are pretty tipsy, and walking 4 km back to Marshmallow is not much fun. I pass out in the front seat for a while, and when I wake up, we sit down at the bench under a giant acorn tree and cook – actually cook – pasta. I invite a German guy in the only other van in the carpark over for some of my cider and we sit at the bench until it goes completely dark and the acorns falling close to our faces start to sound like the footsteps of ghosts.
When I wake up at 8 AM, the rain is coming down hard, and it continues to do so all day. We get breakfast and Wi-Fi at McDonald’s and then drive to Wairere Falls. As I love waterfalls, I get really excited when this view appears before we have even arrived at the carpark.
As we’re walking through the path of mud and rocks, two guys coming from the waterfall warn us that the path has been washed out. We still continue a bit further to see how far we can go, but eventually we reach the point where we can go no further and we’ve still not seen the friggin’ waterfall.
Disappointed and with wet feet, we turn back and drive towards Waitomo. We find an awesome site called Waitomo Farmstay, where we park Marshmallow and go hang out in the kitchen. Here we drink goon and play Disturbed Friends until I chat up Vicky from England and her boyfriend Sam. We all hang out in the kitchen for the rest of the night, which is until there’s no more goon left and the radio’s going silent.
The next morning we are taken around the Waitomo glow worm caves by a direct descendant of the chief who first explored the cave. We walk around inside the limestone cave and hear about its history and facts about limestone and glow worms, before we jump on a boat and sit in complete darkness and silence as a dark sky of thousands of blue stars appears above us. It’s not actually a starry sky, but just the glow worms hanging on to the ceiling of the cave. Just to clear that up.
This photo of Waitomo Glowworm Caves is courtesy of TripAdvisor
We drive down to the Aranui cave and boil some water for coffee in the carpark while waiting for our tour to start. Our guide is an older man who seems to be very passionate about this particular cave. Coming straight from the glow worm cave, we’ve already learned a lot about limestone caves, but it’s an interesting tour and beautiful cave nonetheless.
We have a chat with an older couple from England before we all part ways and then we’re off for a quick stop in Rotorua.