The Road to Queenstown: Driving Down the South Island

2/8/14

    It's been a full week since I last wrote, and that week has been extremely eventful.  Accordingly, I have taken almost as many pictures over these last seven days as I have during all of my prior time here in New Zealand.  My parents and I left Blenheim immediately after my last post, and we made our way westward into Nelson, where we checked in to the Grand Mercuire hotel.  This last week traveling with my family has been a welcome break from constantly staying in hostels; they're always a great time, full of friendly and energetic people who, like me, are out to see the world, but the quality of these hotels I've stayed in recently is appreciated tremendously.  Many of the buildings in Nelson demonstrate a very traditional English sort of architectural style, and our new hotel was no exception.

Just across the street was a similarly quaint little English pub, where we took the majority of our meals during our stay in Nelson.  The pub was called 'The Honest Lawyer,' which I thought to be quite funny, though the humor was lost on my parents, both of whom practice law.

    We stayed in Nelson for two nights, and we were happy to discover that the Speight's Ale House there was showing the Super Bowl on all screens.  It didn't prove to be much of a game, but as this isn't a blog focusing on sports commentary, we won't be dwelling much on the analytics of that.  All I'll say is this: good on ya, Russell, for getting yourself a ring and doing Richmond proud.
    The acclaimed Abel-Tasman national park lies just outside of Nelson, so we were determined to drive out there to pay a visit after being prompted to do so by so many people we've met in New Zealand.  There we encountered the biggest beach that I personally have ever seen in all my life, with sand stretching out towards the water for what I estimate to be at least half a mile.  In that sand, I left a very patriotic mark of our passing:

Just across the sand was a striking range of mountains, one of which was cloaked in a perfect blanket of clouds.

    We made our way down the west coast of the South Island after departing Nelson, heading for some of New Zealand's most iconic glaciers.  We pulled off the road to stretch our legs on a hike to the famous 'pancake rocks,' which proved to be well worth the time invested.  I can best describe them as narrow towers of jutting rocks that rose up out of the ground, each being multi-layered and looking much like a mineral stack of pancakes.

We also encountered an incredible surge pool right next to the pancake rocks, where you could watch swells of water come rolling in from the Tasman sea and crash upon the rock face, spewing a watery mist high up into the air.

    We stopped off in Franz Josef after about six hours of driving, where we would be able to access the acclaimed Franz Josef glacier for which the town was named.  The morning after our arrival, we went on the necessary hike to access the glacier (or glay-seeah, as the Kiwis call it), and were blown away by an array of gorgeous waterfalls scattered along the trail.

    At the end of a short hike, we were greeted by a rising wall of blue ice sandwiched between looming mountains on either side.  The glacier was a real sight; the intense blue color it displayed from top to bottom stood in stark contrast to the dark rock of the surrounding mountainsides.

The spectacle that the Franz Josef glacier and its surrounding waterfalls provided us proved to be the perfect stop to bisect our drive south to Queenstown, and well worth the slightly later start that we got off to on our drive that day.
    We expected our only stop on our second day of driving to be the popular Lake Wanaka that lies just outside of Queenstown, but we happened upon another short hiking trail that led to a waterfall just after getting through the Haast pass, and we quickly elected to explore it.  This again turned out to be an excellent decision, for the waterfall proved to be one of the most magnificent I've yet seen in my travels here, despite a ridiculous amount of sand flies upon the nearby riverbank.  (Sand flies, by the way, are a nasty sort of bug here in New Zealand that bite you relentlessly, leaving unpleasant red spots on your skin that itch like crazy and always remind me of the chicken pox).

    Our last stop approaching Queenstown was Lake Wanaka, as expected.  Though I had previously heard much about the lake, nothing prepared me for what I encountered.  The lake was enormous, and equally beautiful thanks to the sprawling mountains surrounding it.  This, I thought, must be the beginning of New Zealand's best impersonation of the Great Lakes.

Like many of the New Zealand landscapes I had encountered before, the lake was absolutely stunning, and I found myself hard-pressed to keep my eyes on the road after we'd piled back into the car to resume our journey to Queenstown.

This is what a road in New Zealand looks like.
    After a short drive from Lake Wanaka, we rounded a bend in the road and found ourselves upon a vista looking out over the valley in which Queenstown is nestled.  It's a spectacular valley, and I was immediately filled with a sense of overwhelming satisfaction that this was the place I'd be calling home for the next six months.

    I've been in Queenstown for several days now, but I think it would be best to recount that experience in a separate entry.  Which, fortunately, I will begin composing immediately after posting this one, and will likely contain just as many photos, most of which I snapped during a helicopter tour of Milford Sound.

To be continued (very, very shortly),

Jack

LOTR Film/Special Effects Studio & Wine Country in the South Island

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 23^rd, 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 31^st 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

Lord of the Rings: Film Sites Around Wellington

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