2/1/14
It’s
been a while since I last posted, and a lot has happened in that span of
time. Before I left the North
Island behind, I decided to pay a visit to the special effects studio outside
of Wellington known as the Weta Workshop.
Weta does all the props, costumes, and special effects for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, as well as many other
well-known films, such as The Lion, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe series, The
Adventures of TinTin, and Avatar. They even did a lot of work for the
famous Halo video game franchise.
The
first thing you see upon arriving at Weta is three gigantic statues of the
trolls from The Hobbit, mimicking the
positions in which they were turned to stone by the rising sun. The statues are located just outside
the front door, and they look big enough to be life-sized (though who can
really say, with none of us having much lived experience with trolls). Walking into the Weta cave, as it’s
called, you encounter a bunch of glass cases containing props used in the
movies. These cases contain
everything from swords to axes, helms to hauberks, Uruk-hai weapons to hobbit
feet. Perhaps the coolest things I
saw were the original Sting blade, the legs and feet of Bilbo Baggins, a full
suit of Easterling armor, and the wizard hat and staff of Gandalf the Grey, as
well as Radagast the Brown.
Of
course, Weta also featured an extremely overpriced gift shop, and I indulged
myself enough to buy a replica of Sauron’s ring of power (which I haven’t taken
off since). I thought about
getting Aragon’s ring instead, but immediately after trying it on I realized I
couldn’t pull it off nearly as well as Viggo Mortensen does. Weta also offered guided tours through
their actual workshop, so that you could see their designers and prop makers in
action, as well as even more original props from the films they’ve worked on. I went on one of the tours, and though
the workshop was small, it was well worth the low price of admission to see
firsthand. There were countless
weapons and pieces of armor from Lord of
the Rings, the giant castle from Prince
Caspain (which isn’t so giant after all, and is constructed entirely from
foam) and even a fully functioning warthog from Halo, which several of Weta’s employees have apparently used as
their wedding vehicle. We saw
props being constructed for some random TV show that I forget the name of, and
I was brimming with questions for our guide, which she patiently answered. The mounted machine gun on the warthog,
it turns out, is the only non-fully functional part of the vehicle; it spins
and makes a lot of noise, but it doesn’t fire bullets. And the creative genius of Weta’s
employees was only used on props and costumes from Lord of the Rings that lacked any description whatsoever;
otherwise, they stayed completely true to Tolkien’s books, as Peter Jackson
wouldn’t have it any other way.
After
about an hour of touring through the workshop, I headed back into the Weta cave
to watch a short documentary they show every thirty minutes that goes into
detail about how they’ve done some of their more renowned special effects, as
well as the process by which many of their masterful props are manufactured. It was a brief film, but just long
enough to paint a picture of the wonders accomplished by the Weta workshop and
the people behind that work.
On
January 23rd, I drove my Jeep into the cargo bay of the Interislander
ferry and made ready to depart for the South Island of New Zealand. I arrived in Picton at 8:30 P.M., and
drove directly into the small town of Blenheim, where a few of my friends I’d
met in Auckland were staying.
Blenheim is the capital of wine country in the South Island, and there
really isn’t much to do there aside from touring the local vineyards and
indulging in wine tastings, which are mostly free. Each day I spent in Blenheim I would go for a run first
thing in the morning along the banks of the river that cuts its way through the
valley, and then head out to local wineries with my friends from the hostel to
try as many different wines from the region as we could manage, usually getting
to eight or nine wine estates per day.
I bought a case worth of varying wines for my parents in preparation for
their arrival in a week’s time as a late Christmas present, and also got an
idea of which wineries I could recommend to them and which we could bypass
without any great loss. The best
winery in the region was called Brancott, and I visited it a total of six
times, without the quality of its wines ever diminishing in the
slightest.
My
parents flew into Blenheim on the 31st of January, and I checked out
of my hostel to head out to the local airport and pick them up in my rickety
old Jeep Cherokee, which I’d done my best to clean up in an effort to make it
presentable for their arrival. The
three of us checked in to the Hotel D’Urville on Queen Street, and I made a
show of presenting them with each of the bottles of wine I’d accumulated over
the course of my wine touring the past week. We went out for a hike up the Wither Hills our first morning
together in Blenheim, and then we spent the afternoon visiting my favorite
wineries and sampling their best wines.
My parents shared my opinion of Brancott Estates being the best winery
in the valley, and we bought five bottles of their wine between the three of
us.
The
Wither Hills hike was actually much nicer than I expected; we encountered a
bunch of sheep on our way up, and upon reaching the summit we were afforded a
spectacular view of the city of Blenheim below, the patchwork of vineyards
surrounding it, and even the oceanfront a few kilometers off in the
distance. It was really only a
hill that we had climbed, with a maximum altitude of 950 feet, but the time
spent with my family and the isolated panoramic views that the summit afforded
us made the morning’s hike well worth the time we invested in it.
Tomorrow,
the three of us will be piling back into the Jeep to head out to the long
hiking trails of Abel Tasman, and then we’ll hopefully be posting up in Nelson
for the night, where we’ll watch the Super Bowl on the following day. After that, we’ll be making our way
down the west coast to visit the postcard-worthy glaciers of the South Island,
as well as the famous Milford Sound on our way into the skiing metropolis of
Queenstown. It’s likely that I’ll
be spending the remainder of my stay in New Zealand there, looking for a
suitable long-term job and soaking up the wonders of the surrounding sounds,
Lake Wanaka, and Remarkable mountain range. If I’m lucky, I might even land a job that offers a free
pass to the local ski slopes. I’ll
write again before that, I’m sure, and more pictures of the wonders of New
Zealand will of course accompany the posts that are yet to come.
Happy to have the family along for
part of this epic journey in the fantasyland of the Southern Hemisphere,
Jack
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