1/15/14
A few days ago, Simon, Kellogg and I went out around Wellington on a self-guided Lord of the Rings tour with our German friend Jani and our Taiwanese friend Jim. There are several Middle Earth points of interest just outside the city where scenes for the movie series were filmed, and we thought we might as well explore them while we had time to kill here in Wellington. The first place we went to see was the path that was used as the road out of Hobbiton, which is located at the edge of the city limits on the slope up Mt. Victoria. You might remember it best from the scene when Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin tumble down the hillside from farmer Maggot's property and hide under a log from a ringwraith that is searching for them. It wasn't much, being just a road that appears in a few scenes of the film for only a matter of seconds, and we didn't find the log, but it still looked just like it did on screen.
After we'd seen the road from Hobbiton, we figured we might as well climb the rest of Mt. Victoria, since we were halfway up already. At the summit of the mountain (which was really more like a hill), there was a very nice lookout, which offered a fantastic panoramic view of the city of Wellington.
It was also incredibly windy at the top of Mt. Victoria; the breeze was so strong that it had the power to easily throw you off balance, and threatened to knock you over altogether.
Our next Middle Earth destination was the elven city of Rivendell, which is probably the place I've had the second-highest expectations for, next to the Shire. The film site for Rivendell was about forty minutes outside of Wellington, and there were signs leading us to it the entire way.
Our disappointment upon arriving at Rivendell, though, was overwhelming. The place looked nothing like it does in the films, and it featured only a single tree that made an on-screen appearance in the corner of a scene when the elven lord Elrond welcomes the fellowship into the city. Mostly, the tree was just used for movie promos, with Legolas and other elves posing for photographs just beside it. At the supposed Rivendell film site, we also found an information sign for tourists that asked the question, and I quote, "Where are all the elven buildings, waterfalls, ridges and autumn trees?" The sign went on to answer this question, explaining that unfortunately, all of these elements were added in after filming by CGI artists. This is what Rivendell really looks like:
Fortunately, though, the river just outside of Rivendell that Arwen crosses as she flees the pursuing ringwraiths was located nearby, and we found that to look much like it does in the films.
After our disappointment at discovering that the elven city of Rivendell is indeed entirely fictional, we headed out with curbed expectations for the mountain rift into which Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli venture in their effort to recruit the army of the undead. Upon arriving at the film site, we found that in fact there exist many such rifts in a valley of rocky outcroppings, and it was difficult to tell which was the one that appears in the movies. In fact, there was a four hour return hike through this valley of cliffs, and it seemed it would take us forever to finally decide where the actual film site was. As the sun was setting, and most all of the rocky crags looked roughly the same to us, we were happy just to snap a few photos and try our hand at climbing up the cliffs. In doing so, we were quickly rewarded by shoes full of pebbles and a few frighteningly dangerous rockslides that soon discouraged us from pressing our luck any further.
On our way through this valley, we were happy to find a dead branch that looked very much like a replica of Gandalf's wizard staff. It was lying just off to the side of the trail, and we wondered if some other Lord of the Rings fanboys had found the staff themselves and left it for others seeking the film sites to find. We all posed for pictures with the staff, doing our best "you shall not pass" impressions, and in short order were turning around to head back to the car and into Wellington.
I'll be here in Wellington for the next week, awaiting the departure of my ferry for the South Island on the 23rd. I've met some really awesome people here at the hostel, who I'll be happy to spend the next week with before I'm southward bound. My parents will be coming to visit me on the South Island soon after my arrival there, and I expect the three of us will be doing a good bit of hiking and adventuring as we travel down to the southern city of Queenstown together, where they'll fly out of to head back to the States. I'll hopefully be staying there for a while to find a job during New Zealand's ski season, but there will be more updates to come before then. By all accounts, even according to those Kiwis that live here on the North Island, the adventure only gets better down south, and I will as always endeavor to post about everything that's worth writing about (though the internet is supposed to be even worse down there, so that should make things interesting).
Feeling like a local of Middle Earth now,
Jack
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