As soon as we left the lighthouse, the rain caught up with us and poured for the rest of the day. We arrived quite late to the less remote DoC campsite at Matata. Even though it's location was a bit less lonely than the previous night, we still struggled to find it, driving up and down and up and down and up and down the main road of Matata! It was another rainy and miserable night.

The weather has picked up today and we have driven on to the similarly named, but very different, Matamata, also known as 'Hobbitton'. Ruth and I decided to take the tour and were driven out to the farm where the Hobbitton set was built for Lord of the rings. Most of this was pulled down once the films were made, but luckily filming for the prequel 'The Hobbit' had just finished late last year and the film set had been totally rebuilt. Even the few hobbit holes that were left from LOTR were rebuilt to make them look younger and ensure they didn't fall down during filming. We were given lots of movie magic secrets and it was very interesting. The scenery was really nice too, you can see why Peter Jackson chose it as his Hobbiton location. For the filming, a special beer was created and brewed for the actors and used as a drink during filming of the party scenes which we could try. It's alcohol content was just 1% so allowed the actors to get merry without slurring their lines! It was aptly named 'a sobering thought'. It was a good tour and was nice to feel really tall for a short time!

From here we came back into town to have a look around before camping for the night and making good use of the nice hot shower facilities!

We were meant to be going up the Coromandel peninsula but have decided not to as we are doing a lot of driving for not much time there and instead decided to stay here and go up north to the bay of islands as our last stop off in the camper van before Auckland on Sunday.

Amy. x