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The drive from Taupo to Wellington was going to a long one - 380km of road with a "technical" speed limit of 100km at most and suggested driving time of 5 and a half hours excluding stops for lunch or food. Well these things don't really take into account Lucy's driving and penchant for speeding and we did it in about 5 hours including a 30/40 minute stop for lunch in Bulls. Lunch was actually very tasty sweet potato wedges with sour cream and chilli sauce - was something a bit fancy and a bit different to normal wedges and was bout the only thing edible in the town after trying and failing to order food in the pub we tried first. In retrospect it was for the best as it was a bit of a shady establishment with old red-neck type Kiwis gambling in it.
Our navigation skills were also improving managing to locate the hostel with relative ease despite a ridiculously s*** map and a lot of one way streets preventing us from our intended route about every 10 seconds. I jumped out and got directions to the nearest car park, which the receptionist gave to me about as slowly as was humanely possible whilst Lucy sat illegally parked outside. But parked, checked in we sat ourselves in front of the computer and laughed our asses off at Lucy's skydiving DVD, after spending much time trying to get it work and Lucy being immensely concerned that hte DVD had not been burned correctly. It was in fact just Windows Media being s*** - standard. We went to a cool restaurant round the corner for an immense burger and a beer. Then spent a little time in the bar before heading to a dorm room where they had managed somehow to fit 8 beds into the smallest possible space.
We were picked up bright and early at 8:45 the next morning by the Lord of the Rings tour bus who took us first to the River Anduin (and you shall have to abide by the lack of accents and possibly incorrect spellings) where the hobbits leave Lothlorien and end up on the banks and are attacked by the Uraqai. Next was the setting of Rivendell, which New Zealand legally changed the name to, its a nice little park with lots of trees, a nice big river flowing past it, alas they have naturally had to tear down the actual sets and a lot of it was obviously CG, but you could imagine it there and the guide had brought a number of screen shots to illustrate where things had stood. He'd also brought some elf ears and so Lucy and I ran off into the trees for some shots. We then had some pastries and some tea which was appreciated at this early time of day particularly since it had just begun raining.
The rain soon died off and we next went off to Isenguard, where the Tower of Orthanc was set. It is in fact a public park, where we discovered "frisbee golf." I was far more excited about this than the setting. Frisbee golf is effectively the game of golf, but using frisbees as the name would suggest. There is a starting point and you throw the frisbee about the course attempting to get it into these baskets at the end (effectively the hole in golf) - it was the best thing I had ever heard in my life and I was gutted we didn't have any on us (not that I think the tour would have stopped for such a small detour in the day's itinerary). With respect to the park's use in the Lord of the Rings the guide showed us how Peter Jackson had actually gone as far as to have Weta move trees about the shot using CGI, moving one tree from the left here to the right, one tree here further back. The man was clearly a little mad on power at the time.
Our next stop was the setting of both Helms Deep and Minas Tirith - a working quarry which Peter Jackson rented for 3 years for use in the film. There wasn't very much to it and the sets of both were obviously so extensive that with the exception of the odd piece of familiar looking rock there wasn't much to identify it by. The guide did point to how in both sets though tall towers were required to hide certain pieces of key machinery that could not be removed from the quarry.
We then stopped at a cafe in Peter Jackson's neighbourhood, although the guide would not hint where specifically he might live, which was seemingly a cast favourite during filming. We all chose to have a rotini which is in effect a panini but in a pita bread, which the cafe had imaginatively alluded to lambas bread from the book. It was ridiculously tasty (I had a chicken one) and was added to my list of easy and tasty foods I could possibly make myself.
We then stopped to see the location for the city of Bree, which at the time was a building site (an old school having just been torn down) and now is the setting of a very modern and expensive looking private school. Surprisingly we were not allowed to wander the grounds, but we were told that we were closer to Peter Jackson's house than we had been.
Round the corner was Weta Studios where we were allowed into a small museum/gift shop and shown a short 10 minute video of the making of several films and Weta's input, it was a good video, light hearted, informative, but no more so than almost everyone on the tour had seen on any of the Lord of the Rings DVDs.
Our last stop of the day was Mount Victoria the setting of the road to Bree from the Shire where Merry and Pippin fall down the hill joining Frodo and Sam and they hide under the tree stump from the Wraith. Further along we were also shown where the Riders of Rohan assembled to ride to Minas Tirith in the Return of the King all to the theme music, which one of the girl had, and was playing, on her iPod.
Back at the hostel we got in the car to return it to the rental company, but took a wrong exit (thanks to its non existent signage) and ended up on a 20 minute detour which once in the right direction had the place closed. So we then had to head back to Base and park again (thankfully they didn't notice and didn't charge as for an additional day's parking) and headed upstairs to get ready for a night out after calling the company and making up an elaborate story about why we hadn't returned the car. We started in the Base Bar, naturally, taking advantage of some of the offers, before heading to a nice random bar round the corner for some jaegermiester . We finished our rather expensive drinks and headed across the road to Sandwiches were the bouncer said I had to make sure to have a water inside because I was clearly "too drunk." First there is no such thing as "too drunk" unless you are a public nuisance or on course for a trip to the toilets, neither of which I was. Secondly I had had like 4 drinks, was not even in the remotest sense drunk and could quite easily have had a political debate with the man or recited multiplication tables or the alphabet backwards on one leg (ish). But I nodded and smiled and obviously ignored such a stupid suggestion as to have a glass of water and got a beer. The club was playing Dub Step, Lucy's first introduction to it, a 2 beat electro garage genre, being DJ'd by Optimus Prime. I loved the Dj's name, his music was pretty good, but not up to Digital's standards.
We got back to the hostel late and were going to be up early the next day so I did what any rational person would do and went on the internet for an hour. I went to bed at 5:30 and got an hours sleep - fool (of a took)!
We returned the car to the rental place to a grumpy dude who claimed to have waited for an hour at the return which was clearly bulls*** since we'd been half an hour later at most, but thanks to my sweet talking the previous night with a woman on the phone we weren't charged any additional costs and he dropped us off at the ferry terminal as the woman had promised.
The ferry terminal was very airport like. Handing your ticket and ID to a check in desk and them checking in your luggage and letting you take on a smaller piece of hand luggage. There was thankfully none of the security nonsense. I purchased a nice sandwich which eased the hangover somewhat and boarded the ferry some short time after and settled into a comfortable chair on the massive ferry swiftly fell asleep to wake up on the South Island.
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