Hobbiton Movie Set Tour

Two of New Zealand's most popular attractions can be found in the Central North Island: the Hobbiton Movie Set and the amazing Waitomo Caves. Now you can see both of them in one day on one great value InterCity day tour from Auckland!

Sit back and enjoy the lush rural scenery as you head south from Auckland central to a magical Middle-earth location: the private farm outside Matamata which has become famous worldwide as the filming location for Hobbiton in Sir Peter Jackson's award-winning Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movie trilogies.

Take a guided tour of the Hobbiton Movie Set and learn about how this breathtaking film set was created in impressive detail. You'll see Hobbit Holes (including Bilbo's house at Bag End), the Party Tree, the Green Dragon Inn, and hear behind-the-scenes secrets from filming.

After your tour, sit down to lunch at the Green Dragon Inn (included in your tour) and enjoy a feast worthy of Bilbo's birthday party!

Then cross the countryside to the township of Waitomo and head underground into a world of stalactites, stalagmites and twinkling lights: the Waitomo Glowworm Caves.

During your 45-minute tour of this natural wonder, you'll travel through underground tunnels and see vast caverns made from incredible limestone formations. Learn about how the caves were created over millions of years, and experience the magic of an underground boat ride through the Glowworm Grotto - gliding silently through the darkness while glowworms twinkle overhead.

After your Hobbiton and Waitomo Caves day tour, return to Auckland or continue to Rotorua.

Availability: If the Waitomo Caves tour cannot operate, a free upgrade to the Ruakuri Cave will be provided subject to availability. If the Ruakuri upgrade is provided, the Waitomo Caves portion is non refundable.

Tour options

Choose from the following departure and return options:

Auckland return, departing at 8am & returning at 7pm. Available year-round (ICAWHA1)Auckland to Rotorua, departing at 8am & arriving at 6pm. Available year-round (ICAHWR)

Just want to visit Hobbiton? Book our InterCity Hobbiton day tour departing from Auckland, Hamilton or Rotorua from just $114* per person!

Tour includesFull day bus tour from Auckland to Hobbiton and WaitomoEntrance to Hobbiton Movie Set and guided tourLunch at the Green Dragon InnEntrance to Waitomo Glowworm Caves and guided tourFree onboard WiFiReturn or onward travel to Auckland or Rotorua

Departs: 8:00 am, Sky City Bus Terminal, 102 Hobson St, Auckland
Returns: 7:00 pm, Sky City Bus Terminal, 102 Hobson St, Auckland

Northern Italy hosts a series of glacial lakes that are considered high-end real estate today. Lake Como (Lago Di Como) attracts famous people throughout the world, and all of them want to see Isola Comacina, the island that sets upon that lake.

Web search A-listers who are associated with real estate there. What attracts them to it? Realize that people have sought this place long before modern times. Ancient history is best revealed by an ancient, authoritative historian. Roman historian, Publius Cornelius Tacitus is a highly reliable information source. Tacitus wrote extensively about political power wielded by Roman Emperors Nero, Claudius, and Tiberius, as well as four other emperors in succession during the tumultuous year of 69 AD.

In his writing, Tacitus describes a Germanic people (the Suebi), as occupying the lake region of Northern Italy. Later historians further defined those Germanic people as "The Lombards," from which the Lombardy Region of Northern Italy (where Lake Como resides) was derived. I would not say that Rome conquered the Lombards in that place, although they certainly did wage war on them and fought them there. It was more like the Romans assimilated the Lombards into their empire. Simultaneously, the Romans were seduced, over time, to appreciate and respect the Lombards, to take up residences among them and enjoy the beauty of the lakes.

As the Roman Empire receded, others filled the void: The Goths, the Franks, powerful feudal families like the Visconti family, and the influence of Charles V of Spain. The region also attracted many orders of monks, who established monasteries in some of the prettiest, yet somewhat inaccessible portions of the region, usually with the help of a powerful and wealthy benefactor who wanted the monks to record their personal or family history. The monks, always inwardly focused, also introduced a lot of agriculture, especially the growing of vineyards and the fermenting of wine.

So many people want to visit this region, and many affluent people want to live on one of the Northern Italian lakes. Experience the qualities of this place that speak to them. Will they speak to you as well?

When I set out on my first adventure pulling a 2.5 tonne caravan behind my shiny new, Toyota Prado 4 Wheel Drive, I knew Jack about caravans. I'd just picked it up - all 7 metres of it - at a Geelong sales yard.

It was raining heavily. Dressed in my usual shorts, polo shirt, good quality thongs, wearing my Canadian Tilley hat, my Tag-Heuer diving watch, and usual positive outlook, I held an umbrella over the head of an employee who patiently showed me how to hitch the caravan to the Prado. He was already saturated, but I felt as though I should at least be making an effort to keep him dry.

On the drive to a caravan park only five or six kilometres away, I struggled through heavy Friday afternoon traffic, travelled over a bridge undergoing a revamp that looked too narrow for my caravan but eventually got to the caravan park in one piece. I had thought I should have displayed a large sign that said, "Caution. Newbie towing Caravan".

Fate and good driving kept me in good stead. All I had to do now was to survive eight weeks driving around the lovely state of Victoria. With my caravan number plate displaying the byline, "Victoria, the place to be", it seemed like I had made the right choice. Not as far to travel from my home at Alice Springs if the new caravan suffered a warranty issue.

By the end of the eight weeks, I had decided there are two main types of people one meets in caravan parks, the person:

who can't help himself (usually men) from telling you how much better all the gear they have on their caravan is than yours
who has retired from the workforce but who cannot cast off the notion of how very important he had been before retirement. He was once a Rooster, but now is just a feather duster
One of the first places I stopped, I forget where it was now, we had no sooner parked our van and this fellow turned up wearing what we called a "giggle hat" in the military, more commonly known as a bucket hat. Well, he had to tell me that he had the xyz type widget for his van and had noticed that I had the inferior zyx widget on mine. It was just what I wanted to hear a few days after shelling out $50 odd thousand for a caravan.
Next, it was the abc widget - I should have gotten one of those. So it went on until I eventually told him that I had to set up my caravan - which should have been obvious to any 10 year old - and he left us alone. Had he not, I probably would have addressed him in an uncharacteristically rude manner.

A few days later I met the man who had been so important, if I had lived in Perth, I probably would have heard of him. He had to tell me how he had been the Chief Executive Officer of one of Australia's largest IT companies. He also had a single engine airplane he had bought in a kit from the USA and assembled all by himself. He also had to tell me about his expensive Breitling pilot's watch.

He seemed like a nice person so I didn't have the heart to tell him I didn't give a brass razoo what he had been. I didn't tell him about my collection of tertiary qualifications and that I had been a big shot in an educational institution, a senior public servant in not one, but two governments. To me, all that is now meaningless, just a means of surviving for 50 odd years.

I'm just a retiree who enjoys not being anything but a greying nomad who gets up each day and decides what he wants to do to fill in what hours he has left. It's a great stage of life and allows one to travel extensively. Complete freedom. Living the dream!

Now when I meet these types, I simply let them rabbit on until they run out of something to say. If they ask me what I did before I retired, I tell them the truth: I worked at a high security facility 25 km west of Alice Springs and my job was so secret even I didn't know what I was doing. That usually shuts them up.

I'm happy to be a feather duster.

Robin is retired and living the dream having worked for 51 years. He spends his time travelling, volunteering for several organisations, and wonders how he ever had time to work.

He lives in the beautiful Barossa Valley, Australia's premier wine-producing region.