Hobbiton | North Island, New Zealand

Hobbiton! On our last day in New Zealand, we made the three hour drive from Auckland down to Hobbiton, the famed set of The Lord of the Rings. We went for the full Hobbiton feast, with tours before and after sunset.

The set is actually on a sheep farm. When the location scouts initially inquired, the family didn’t seem to mind their farm being used as long as the gate was closed so their sheep weren’t let out.

Adorable hobbit holes!

The entire set was created from temporary materials and taken down after filming the initial LOTR trilogy, but they recreated it all and designed it to be a tourist destination when they later filmed the Hobbit trilogy.

It’s a good thing Air New Zealand has all of the LOTR movies available on their flights; I brushed up on The Fellowship of the Ring and watched An Unexpected Journey for the first time on my flight over from California. It’s pretty incredible how much effort and money went into building this world for snippets of scenes that appear for split seconds at a time.

When they initially chose this spot, the one thing missing from the otherwise perfect location was a perfect oak tree, so they hand picked a tree whose shape they loved and then manufactured all of the leaves in Taiwan and glued them one by one to the branches. Mind boggling.

After walking through Hobbiton, we headed over to The Green Dragon where we would have dinner.

Feast! So much food!

After we were stuffed, we grabbed lanterns and headed back through Hobbiton on our night tour.

Visit Hobbiton

We took the Evening Banquet Tour, at $190 NZD/pp, which at the moment, is about $140 USD. It’s obviously pricey and best if you have at least a few LOTR enthusiasts in your group, but we all had fun– even Jess, who had never seen any of the movies. =)
Don’t rely too much on the night tour for photos. It was too rushed for us to get any good long exposures and was generally disappointing for photos. But the pre-dinner tour was fun! Plenty of photo ops.
Arrive early if you want to visit the gift shop, since it’ll be closed by the time you return from the tour. You can buy postcards and stamps and mail them directly from within Hobbiton.

Anna Wu is a wedding and portrait photographer based in San Francisco but often traveling and working around the world. She creates beautiful, soft, and timeless imagery while capturing the most fleeting of moments. View her work at annawu.com, follow her daily adventures on instagram, or contact her to book your own session today.