March 31 - Brook - Today was our first day off. Vivian and Becca went with their individual host families to their "batches" (cottages) for the day.

Brenda, Katie and I went with John & Judith Miocevic on a adventure for the day south of Auckland. First we headed for "Middle Earth" and hobbit town straight from the Lord of the Rings. This movie set is near a town called Matamata. Having never been to a movie set before I wasn't sure what to expect. Amazing attention was paid to detail that we found we were waiting for a hobbit to come out from one of the little hobbit doors. There was a tree the first book was described as an Oak tree above Frodo's door. Well, since there was no Oak tree in this particular area they found an Oak tree cut it into slices and rebuilt it in the correct spot with bolts and screws. Since they killed the tree in the process the leaves all fell off. Then they ordered over a million fake oak leaves from Tiawan and paid 10 students to wire them back on. This didn't last long and the tree started to rot, so for the second scene they needed to film they had to recreate the tree with a metal frame and styrafoam outer layers and order more Tiawan leaves. This would have worked but filming was delayed and the leaves all faded. So they paid some more students to have them paint the leaves green again.

Next we went to Waitomo and went on a tour of the famous glowworm caves. We were able to walk into the caves for the first half of the tour and look at the cave formations. Finally we were able to see the Glowworms and their pupa, apparently they are the only form of biofluroescent organism that lives in caves and are only found in New Zealand and Australia. Another beautiful day!