Flew into New Zealand yesterday morning at 7am, picked up our car and drove down to Matamata, where the Hobbiton scenes from Lord of the Rings were filmed. Driving around New Zealand is unreal - crazy trees, green rolling hills, really high speed limits (what’s a “kilometer” anyway) and traffic-safety propaganda billboards everywhere. “Lose your confidence, save your life”, “Locals crash too”, etc. Driving on the wrong side is easy (once the jet lag wore off), sitting in the passenger side with a steering wheel is a bit trickier.

Matamata is a tiny town (~10K people), and the LOTR tour is their biggest draw. I usually detest tourist attractions, but this one is straight up my alley - I’ve read those books countless times in Russian & English, I liked the movies, and now I actually got to walk around the Shire, crawl into a hobbit-hole, stand on the road where Gandalf rode in with his fireworks wagon. Totally made me feel like a kid inside my favorite cartoon. Too bad $2 NZD only buys me 15 min of internet in this old-school arcade-style machine, or I’d try to post pictures too.

I’m writing this from a hostel in Taupo (resort town on a mountain lake) where we stayed. Off to more adventures…