July 25th: day 29

Saturday morning we woke up and we knew we had a Lord of the Rings tour at 1:30…but I desperately needed to buy some new pants, so we went and shopped around looking for stores. When I finally found some we headed back to the hostel for some lunch and then our Lord of the Rings tour.

BACKGROUND: Lord of the Rings was filmed in NZ; most of the outdoor scenes were shot in Wellington. Although I am not the biggest fan of Lord of the Rings, I have seen all 3 movies and I am familiar with the story. I am going to refer to Lord of the Rings as LOTR from here on out also, because I refuse to keep typing Lord of the Rings again and again. And warning, a lot happened this day, some neat stuff, some you might not be into, I guess read and find out…if it starts to bore you, you can move on.

Our guide picked us up at about 1:20 pm. He was really friendly, a young guy of about 28. Our first stop was on top of a nearby mountain where we could look out at all of Wellington and the bay.

After that he took us to our first LOTR tour spot. He showed us where Frodo (1^st movie) and the other hobbits are standing on a road, the wind starts the blow and Frodo can tell that someone bad is coming for him, he says “I think we should get off the road” and then go and hide under this giant tree trunk. Although the tree trunk was fake, since they had to make regular size humans look about 3 or 4 feet tall, but we got to stand on the road where he says that line and re-enact that scene. The tour guide even took our picture standing there. He took us to a few other places on the mountain like an opening in the top of the hill when the guy on the horse just stands there for a while and then rides off. Next we went to a rock quarry where Peter Jackson (director of LOTR) created two of the castles in the movie.

After the quarry we saw Rivendell, which is where the elves live in the forest. Their town of Rivendell is so beautiful but not it’s just a forest. Since it is a national park, it’s basically just some trees but then when the guide started showing us movie stills, we began to see where the same trees stood there and where Orlando Bloom did a photo shoot that pretty much made him famous. Well this movie really made Orlando Bloom famous, but regardless…I don’t know what the big deal is anyway, he’s not that cute, Viggo Mortensen is way cuter in this movie. Then we did something that I can cross off my bucket list, which is walk thru a rainforest. Although it wasn’t a tropical rainforest, it is a temperate rainforest, it looks the same it just doesn’t have all the same animals and plants. This particular rainforest was 40 min out of Wellington and it got twice the amount of rain as the actual city of Wellington does. It was so neat but there was absolutely no sun on the forest floor, the pictures I took were awful because there was no light. I have always wanted to visit a rainforest, and I finally got my dream fulfilled. We also found out that the movies Jurassic Park, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and 10,000 BC was filmed in Wellington also. That tour took up the rest of the day and there wasn’t room for anything else. It was one of my favourite days of all time.