New Zealand -- North Island

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November 14: Auckland
We had a very easy flight from Sydney to Auckland. We got a shuttle bus in to downtown where we decided to stay at a hostel called XBase. Their selling point is that they designed their facilities based on the wishes, complaints and feedback of the youth hostel community. This was pretty clear. The last time I used youth hostels (in Europe in 1996) they were designed to enforce a certain degree of order and paternalistic discipline among their degenerate clientele (gender segregated dorms, curfews, daytime lockouts to prevent late sleeping, etc). This place was the exact opposite: instead of a harsh no-alcohol policy in the hostel, it has a bar XBase with wet t-shirt contests on Tuesdays and amateur pole dancing on Thursdays. That's what you get by catering to 20yearolds instead of trying to make them behave. Not being 20 years old, it did seem a little absurd to us. XBase did have the little petty inconveniences that remind you you're in a hostel--a sink so small you can't use it to wash your face, and, inexplicably, right at 10am, when everyone is trying to get down 6 flights of stairs to check out, the housekeeping staff chooses this time to vacuum the stairwells, all at once, on every floor. Ha ha! In our one night in Auckland, we had a walk along the beautiful harbor and had dinner at a Brazilian churrasco called Wildfire. The food was pretty nice and I finally caught up on my red meat backlog from Asia. After, we went to a bar called Minus 5, where you pay a cover charge to get in for about 30 minutes. The trick is that it's 5 below (celsius... that's 23 Fahrenheit) inside and you have to wear special fur lined parkas that they give you at the door. Inside, you get a free drink (vodka cocktails served in glasses made of ice) and hang around with ice sculptures taking pictures of yourself. Like many things in New Zealand, it seems to rely on people coming in (there were about 20 people in at various times while we were there, on a weeknight) and having a go because, well, that's not something you get the chance to try every day.

November 15: Today we woke up early and headed out of Auckland to Hamilton. One example of how thinly populated New Zealand is is the nature of Highway 1, the main road from Auckland (the largest city) to Hamilton (the largest inland city) is basically recognizable as a motorway only for about the first 20 minutes, and then becomes an undivided one-lane-each-way road, like a little country road in the US or UK. It passes through the middle of all the little towns on its route, becoming their main streets--it's even crossed by UK-style zebra crossings in a lot of places, which means that all cars need to stop if there's a pedestrian who wants to cross. We stopped at a little roadside town that is principally famous as the site of a major battle (the Battle of Rangiriri) between the English and the Maori in the 1863 (about 100 people killed total for both sides). The visitor center / cafe was empty and the woman working there scrambled around dragging things inside and putting up the "closed" sign when she saw us approaching at 4.30pm. I was expecting Hamilton to be like a small version of Auckland, but instead it reminded me of the scale and design of Slidell, Louisiana (sorry non Louisianans)--that is to say, basically one storey new buildings arranged mostly in strip mall style, plus very pleasant and quiet suburbs. The downtown was completely shut (except for bars and some restaurants on the south side of town) at 5pm. We did see a bronze monument to Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show--the creator worked at a barber shop in Hamilton and saw the B movies that inspired the RHPS at a theater there. In Hamilton we bought a NZ road atlas--in all respects a proper road atlas--which actually lists geographical features by their real name, and then, if appropriate, lists the LOTR geographical feature that was filmed on that site. So for example, tomorrow we're going to be hiking near Mt.Ngauruhoe, which the road atlas lists as Mt. Ngauruhoe, "Mt Doom". Then we stopped in to visit our friends Rowi and David, who we know through our roommate Leo (Leo and Rowi went to uni together). After a lovely dinner we turned in.

November 16: After a cup of coffee, we said goodbye and thanks to our friends and headed east out of Hamilton towards Matamata, through the region called Waikato. The countryside along the way looked a bit like the Scottish highlands with rolling hills, cliffs, rockfaces and bigger hills off in the distance, but with a well-tendedness that is more common in England, and with grass that is a bright, vibrant green that really jumps out at you. Another way to think of it is that it looks just like the countryside in the Shire scenes of the LOTR movies. After a few hours we reached the Matamata tourist information office, just in time to jump on a tour bus for the sheep farm where all the Hobbiton sconces from the LOTR were shot. This was an interesting experience on a couple of levels. First, it gave us a little insight into the process of making movies--the tour guide lady explained how in about 1997, New Line had sent a bunch of scouts around Waikato (which had been identified as Peter Jackson as the like Olde-England looking part of the North Island) in planes or helicopters looking for suitable locations, the key criteria being a big, symmetrical tree, near a lake, in rolling hills, and without too much 20th century junk visible from the valleys. The Alexander sheep farm has all of these things, the most interesting of them being the tree that was the Party Tree in the Bilbo's birthday parts of the FOTR. The party tree apparently wasn't altered to meet requirements--it naturally grew into a big, round symmetrical tree shape. The oak tree on top of Bag End was cut down on a nearby farm and reassembled with 250,000 fake leaves from Taiwan wired on--but the Party Tree was just perfect. These days, just a tiny bit of the streamers from the party is visible. The second interesting insight was the legal relationship between New Line and the Alexanders, which kept cropping up in the tour guides' discussion of the area. The Alexander family originally didn't negotiate any right to keep the sets up, and in fact the contract provided that the Hobbiton set built on their land would be torn down when filming was finished. As it happens, the demolition crews had only taken down about half of the set when winter set in and the demolition stopped. By the next summer, the Alexanders were deluged with people asking to see the site, so they clearly sensed an opportunity at that stage. However, it took another two years to get the contracts signed to allow the tours to start. Among the things they're not allowed to do are rebuild the structures of hobbit holes to make them look as they did in the movies, or even plant flowers in front of them. They were allowed to repair them with treated timber so they'll last, but there are specific photos that they've been licensed to enlarge and use as exhibits to explain different bits of the site. It's apparent that the owners of the site feel a little badly used by New Line. In particular, they've been refused permission to rebuild Sam's hobbit hole, the one in front of which the ROTK ends. The third aspect of the tour which was really interesting was just to see the physical location on which so much footage was shot, and to get a sense of the obsessive ness which went into the filmmaking and which probably has a lot to do with why the trilogy was so good. Anyway, on the tour they're able to explain and point out basically where all the Shire scenes were done, which is really fun to see. (Oddly, the "If I take one more step, I'll be further from home than I've ever been" scene is about 80 meters from Hobbiton!) Bag End was under construction, so unfortunately we didn't get to go in, and they had a backhoe on top of it. At least it will be preserved for the generations. The tour guides also point out some pretty amazing things. For example, somehow Peter Jackson gleaned from reading the trilogy that the sheep in the Shire looked like black-faced Suffolk sheep. So he had a flock of those sheep flown in from god knows where to populate the Shire, EVEN THOUGH THERE WERE 12,000 WHITE FACED SHEEP ON THE SHEEP FARM IN WHICH THE SHOOTING WAS BEING DONE. Insane. Also, there were about 15 hobbit holes built and kitted out with garden and path, etc, on Bagshot Row below Bag End, where enormous amounts of footage were shot and less than 2 seconds of which made it into the trilogy. So the tour was pretty interesting, even through it was outrageously expensive. I guess the proprietors know their customers. It is the clearest LOTR site in New Zealand and they must know that a lot of people will pretty much pay anything, like me. P was pretty good natured about being dragged around to "Hobbit Town". After leaving Matamata we continued on to Rotorua. We hadn't really planned on going there during the earlier stages of planning our trip, but P wanted to get a little bit of exposure to the Maori culture while we were here and Rotorua is a good place to do it. Right after we arrived, we stopped in at the Rotorua Tourist Information Center, which had brochures for pretty much everything there was to do. We ended up getting about 15 brochures for various things we were thinking about doing, but other folks ended up with leaflets for all kinds of random things, including a overcologned Spanish disco rat we saw staring bemusedly at a leaflet for trout fishing. Anyway, we booked a Maori cultural evening, which consisted of going to a Maori village where we ate a nice (though somewhat bland) meal of lamb, chicken, potatoes and sweet potatoes which had been cooked by burying them in a hole with glowing embers. We also had a guide who explained a bit about the protocol that applied in the olden days to members of one tribe visiting another tribe (the receiving tribe would send out their fiercest and scariest looking warrior to put down a peace token and see if the arriving tribe picked it up). The guide was a bit of a goofball who would occasionally ask if there were any questions, but rarely knew the answers to the real head-scratchers that the audience would come up with. So our little group of 100 tourists was represented by a chief (some poor Australian sap who got volunteered by his wife while out of the room taking his kid to the bathroom). When the scary warrior guy came out (looking really Polynesian, with grass skirt, tattoos and fern in the hair) and put down a fern branch as a peace token, our chief had to pick it up and make a nice speech thanking the receiving tribe for having us, whereupon the actual chief of the tribe we were visiting gave a very, very long speech (in Maori) welcoming us. About 12 people from the local tribe were there and put on a little cultural performance of some of their traditional songs and dances. Most of these seemed to revolve around making really scary faces by bulging out their eyes and sticking out their tongues. The tongue-sticking is particularly interesting, because it basically means "you look tasty". So they don't really shy away from the cannibalistic part of their cultural heritage. The Maori have an interesting sense of humor which is both self- and other- deprecating and were remarkably laid back and honest about presenting a little bit about their traditional way of life to total strangers. One thing that was interesting was that the chief indicated which of his tattoos were real, and which are painted on for the show. His facial tattoos (covering his whole face) were painted, while the tattoos that covered his lower abdomen down to his thighs were all real (and apparently took about 55 hours to do). After dinner they took us on a fun walk through their land behind the village, where they had glowworms (basically nifty caterpillars that make a point of blue light from their rear ends) and a bubbling spring in a clear pond. In the pond were some fish and some creepy 4 foot long eels. All in all, a great night out.

November 17: In the morning we did a few little errands and then used our free tickets (thrown in with the Maori evening) to the Polynesian spa, which has several different geothermal pools you can swim in. The biggest is a bright green alkaline pool about 38 degrees celsius (100 Fahrenheit). We spent most of our time floating in this one. There were also three smaller pools of bright blue mildly acidic water with various bits of minerals floating around. The warmest of these was about 42 degrees celsius (108 Fahrenheit) but the hottest we got in was 41 degrees celsius (106 Fahrenheit), and even that was too hot to be pleasant. The pools were on the shore of Lake Rotorua, which is made of weird chalky smoking rock. After that we went to a little Maori village where there were more thermal pools that the local people use to bathe, cook and wash clothes, and various steaming pools and bubbling mud pits. They also have a geyser that fires off every 60 to 90 minutes, which we saw erupting. After leaving the Maori geothermal village, we left Rotorua and drove to the aptly named little town of National Park just before dark. The scenery in the mountains up was amazing, especially the views of Mt Ruapehu. We had a heavy bar-food dinner at the local pub (Schnapps' Pub) and went to sleep early.

November 18: Today we woke up really early to do the Tongariro Crossing. It is billed as the best one-day walk in New Zealand (though some people say Avalanche Peak on the South Island is better--can't say yet...), so we decided to give it a try. The day before had been pretty good weather but we thought it had rained overnight and didn't really know what the conditions were going to be like, so we went carrying and wearing more gear than was probably strictly necessary. The first hour or two was pretty pleasant walk along a volcanic valley, with the massive, snow-covered Mt Ruapehu in the background, the snow-capped volcano Mt Ngauruhoe to your right (this volcano, minus the snow in the summer, was Mt Doom in the LOTR, and the Mt Tongariro itself to the left. The volcanic valley is full of extinct lava flows and basalt and pumice formations everywhere littering the valley floor. Occasionally, something is still smoking from underground thermal heat. Tongariro National Park is where (you guessed it) many of the Mordor scenes from the LOTR were shot. Anyway, after a while, the path turned into a fairly miserable 45 degree climb straight up a saddle onto the rim of a big crater. Then you walk across the floor of the crater, which is maybe 500 meters across. There was a fair amount of snow on the ground still. When we got to the other rim of the crater, there was a second steep climb on to the ridge on the other rim of the crater. At the top of this one, we could begin to smell sulfur coming from ahead of us, and "Mt Doom" behind and to our left was now half shrouded in low clouds. When we got to the other side of the ridge, we could see ahead where a lot of other hikers had stopped, standing in hot sulfurous mists coming off of the cliff face below. The visibility in the clouds was only about 8 meters and it was about 10 degrees warmer. Below we could see what was obviously Red Crater, a huge, smoking, angry looking crater in the side of the mountain below. It isn't just a metaphorical reddish--it's a strong, dark vermillion, like a red substance from a chemistry set. Part of it is a gray structure that looks like it blew itself apart not so long ago. As we continued along the ridge, there was another steep climb and then we passed a series of lakes called the Emerald Lakes, which we pools of water a few dozen meters across that have been colored a brilliant blue-green by the minerals that have leached into them over time. On the other side of the ridge was another huge crater a few hundred meters across, with black basalt at the epicentre and walls still covered in winter snow. Further along the ridge, we passed a brilliant blue lake and then began to go down again, through a few hours of twisty switchbacks first through lava and basalt fields and then through alpine meadows. After stopping at a hikers' hut to eat lunch, we continued to descend through alpine meadows and then through a pretty forest. At the end of the trail there was a bus to take us back to our hostel. We had tasty pizzas at the slowest restaurant I've ever experienced (45 minutes for appetizers to arrive, 75 minutes for mains). On the way home, I saw a shooting star just looking up for a second. We got back to the hotel, I tended my blisters, and then passed out.

November 19: After eating a few bananas, we loaded up the car and drove out of National Park. Our plan was to drive to the west coast of the North Island, take a little walk around the snow-covered Mt Taranaki (which was the archetypically shaped volcano used in The Last Samurai as a stand in for Mt Fuji), and then drive down the west coast toward Wellington and stop when we got tired. The distances didn't look very far on the map, but the roads west from National Park were very small and twisty, going uphill and downhill around hills, along ridges and over saddles. One stretch of this road has been imaginatively titled the "Forgotten World Highway" by some enthusiastic tourist board official. I wondered why until at one point I looked out of the window to the left and saw that we had left the craggy hills and green grass of sheep farms and were in a big, dense forest of huge fern trees. You might have wondered when the dinosaurs were going to poke their heads through the leaves and wave hello and Peter Graves wander out wearing a safari suit and toting an elephant gun, raving about giant bugs. The road passed through a scenic reserve of fern forest and we stopped at a picnic site to take a short walk down a trail to the grave of a surveyor who died while laying the route for this road during the 1880s. After a while we reached the small town of Stratford (home of NZ's only glockenspiel clocktower) but unfortunately the clouds were so low that most of Mt Taranaki wasn't visible. We drove up to the highest carpark anyway and had about an hour's walk along some ridges, where we had a very nice view of the bottom bit of the volcano, plus the town of Stratford and surrounding farmland and the ocean in the distance. Then we had a quick drive down the coast to Palmerston North, which is a university town near Wellington. It reminded me a bit of New Haven in that it was studenty but also a bit crap and poor-looking. We had a nice Cambodian dinner at a local restaurant and stayed at a so so hostel.

November 20: Today we woke up early and drove down to Wellington. Our plan was to shop for a simple GPS and then practice using it by looking for a particular path up near Mt Victoria (which is basically in the town itself) where the "get off the road" sequences of the FOTR were shot, including the iconic shot of the hobbits cowering on a dropoff just beside a road where a black rider trots up. We had the GPS coordinates of the exact spot from a location guidebook I picked up. The town is very confusing to navigate, so we ended up spending a couple of hours wandering around looking for things. In the end, we managed to see a lot of the nice parts of Wellington quite by accident (the Botanical Gardens, Lambston Quay (main shopping area), the Embassy Theatre, the quite spectacular Mt Victoria Lookout and the Cable Car). The downside was that we only had about an hour to try to find the spot. Anyway, the woods on the side of the mountain are quite atmospheric and we knew we were within about 80 meters but the thick woods prevented us from getting a better signal and we had to give up. On the upside, we got a pretty good sense of Wellington by blundering around it all day! After we checked into our hostel (Wellington City YHA), we had a nice but not particularly Italian seafood dinner at an Italian restaurant (Zicco on Courtenay Place) and then went to see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang at a nearby multiplex. I have to say that Wellington is really lovely. Even though most of the city is quite new, the buildings are still very pretty and the whole town is very green with lots of gardens and parks both in private and public spaces. The harbor is a gorgeous blue color with lots of white-capped waves from the constantly strong wind. There also seemed to be quite a lot of "culcha" going on even though there are only about 200,000 people living there.

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Photos

Minus 5
The first bar I've been to where they hand coats OUT at the coat check.

P and Riff Raff
There we were, looking at a piece of transvestite camp history!

Construction crew at Bag End
Doing a bit of structural work at the end of Bagshot Row.

Maori cultural presentation
The guy on the right with the tatooed face is the chief!

Mt Ngaurhoe
A particularly Mordor-y angle with basalt strewn about the bottom.

Mt Ngaurhoe with snow
The snow on the side makes it look less ominous, but you can see the trademark shape better here.

Red Crater
"Is that the Red Crater?" "Gee I dunno..."

Mt Ngaurhoe and Red Crater
Us glad that we're now 2/3 done with the climb...

P in a scenic reserve off of the Forgotten World Highway
We were pretty sure claymation dinosaurs were lurking around somewhere...

Fern fiddlehead
This looked pretty yicky and primordial by plant standards.

The bottom 20% of Mt Taranaki
Imagine that this is the base of a big Mt Fuji looking volcano. The clouds never cleared, so that's what we did!

Get off the road? Get on it first.
This is somewhere within 80 meters of the "Get off the road" sequence in FOTR. Stupid GPS never got a fix and we ran out of time. Well, you get the idea.

Killer bird
This is one of the birds that attacked us. I used the big zoom since I didn't want to get too near it. It must have been at least the size of a smallish pigeon!

Coast walk near Kaikoura
We wandered around the top and the bottom of these cliffs looking for seals.

Horseback riding
This is the best picture I got because I didn't want to let of the reins too long!