Continuing on with our LOTR tours in New Zealand…if you haven’t seen Part I which is pretty much all about Hobbiton you should start there.

Weathertop (Amon Sûl)

Unfortunately the hills used for the attack on Weathertop are deep in private property – it is not really possible to get to it to have a close up look at the actual hill. However, there is no ruined tower there anyway! The site used is apparently a composite of a real hills from this general area with CGI effects to add the tower.

This is kind of like where Weathertop was shot.  Might even have been the spot…lots of CGI there.

The region where some of this was filmed is near Port Waikato on the West coast of the North Island. It is actually the last site we visited, but I figure it is more interesting to present them to you in the order they show up in the story rather than follow our willy-nilly path all over the countryside.

Port Waikato is somewhat remote but absolutely beautiful. Located at the mouth of the Waikato river where it meets the Tasman Sea, there is a small summer village and some nice beaches. It is a popular summer spot but you need to bring your own supplies because there isn’t much there besides the summer cottages and camp grounds.  We showed up hoping to stay in a campground and dine locally; good luck with that one!

Zoomed out you can see the huge valley, there is a cliff behind the kids that is farther from the road than usual.

To reach the hills where the movie was set you need to head through Port Waikato onto a small, very winding road. I mean winding by New Zealand standards, where Route 1 – the Kiwi  equivalent of I-95 in the U.S.  – has twists and turns in it where you can’t do more than about 30 mph around them. Very quickly after you leave the coast the land gets steep and the character changes, with steep-sided pastures full of cows, sheep and rocky bluffs. Eventually the road changes to gravel and becomes a single lane, with the inevitable plunge over the side to a certain and fiery death. Which I am becoming quite used to by the way, as well as driving on the wrong side of the road.  Of course by then the gravel road is a single lane so there is no “side” to worry about, except the one you can drive off, of course.

Some of these places the film crews had to get to by helicopter, or they had to build roads to them.  Apparently there was a fair it of staying at some landmark hotels and choppering in to film.

The River Anduin

The River Anduin, heavily featured in The Fellowship of the Ring, was actually a composite of several rivers in both the North and South islands of New Zealand.  Unfortunately I was a little confused when we set out and thought we were heading to the Argonauth and was looking forward to convincing Will to take the part of Isuldur when we re-created the image on camera using clever forced perspective.

Will would have been the one on the left.

As it turns out the gorge where the Argonath was added in is way down in South Island somewhere.  So we had to be content with some of the other scenic parts of the river.

There are some scenes showing the Fellowship paddling through gorges and along a beautiful scenic river – it was to one of these that we headed.

New Zealanders are a little touched about some things, in particular adrenalin.  There some things that to Kiwis are considered “fun”, whereas someone like myself might consider them “wretched”, “terrifying” or “vomit inducing”.  These include acts like bungee jumping from cliffs, bridges and buildings, an appalling looking thing called a “Flying Fox” and even some thing in Auckland where they launch you up from the perfectly solid ground high into the air for no apparent reason.

It was to one of these places that we set out for – Gravity Canyon, where one can take an 80 meter (250 foot) bungee jump into a canyon over the Rangitikei river or ride the appalling Flying Fox.

This may be one of the Rangitikei shots, but the water was much lower for us.

The Rangitikei river is one of the rivers used in the gorge scenes on the Anduin.  The scenes on the river are fairly fast and hard to make out.  More importantly for me…if you haven’t picket up on it yet I’m not a huge fan of heights.  I’ll deal with them if I have to, for example climbing on the roof of the house was doable, if hated.  But that sort of cliff front “hey let’s go spit over the edge” thing just isn’t something I love.

Which also suggests that DRIVING along these huge gorges on narrow winding country roads without freaking guard rails is not my idea of fun either.  By the time we got back to the Gravity Gorge I was pretty much ready to start drinking heavily. The health nuts that run that place though seemed to feature only milk shakes and smoothies for some reason, I suppose Liquid Courage is discouraged if you are about to fling yourself off a bridge into a 250 foot deep gorge lest you send your stomach contents further down onto the recovery crew at terminal velocity.  It’s what I would do.

We did take some pictures, but they weren’t too spectacular as there hadn’t been any rain for weeks and the river looked more like a trickle than a torrent.  You got a feel for the gorges, but the water was very hard to pick out.  And I had an incident with my camera card, so the pictures I took by sidling up to the edge and shooting over the side with my eyes closed were lost anyway; I may come back and edit later if I find a good one on the kids cameras.

The Emyn Muil

Andy Serkis really earned my respect when we visited the site of some of the Emyn Muil footage. As Gollum you didn’t really see Andy Serkis on-screen until The Return of the King, where I am fairly certain they gave him screen time because he couldn’t qualify for any nominations as a supporting actor with only a CGI avatar on the screen. But he may have had the toughest job of any actor on the set. In spite of being scrawny and wasted Gollum is a pretty physical character – he gets in fights, climbs, jumps, splashes in streams, bites people, and in general gets smacked around a lot. To create this they covered Mr. Serkis in a suit with body motion sensors while he acted out all Gollum’s body motions which were later re-skinned and scaled to look like this gangrel, ill favoured creature.

That’s Mr. Serkis on the right…

Apparently this included climbing down a cliff face upside down.

Here is the spot they above scene was filmed. Believe it or not, it is actually at a ski resort. Which is on a volcano, Mt. Ruapehu which last erupted in 2007, when some of the ejecta worked its way to the resort.

No matter how hard core Volcano Skiing may seem, I am more impressed that Andy Serkis climbed down that inverted cliff face wearing Virtual Reality imaging gear to get the shot. Even though I’m sure they had a harness on him, climbing down that to do a movie take is pretty badass.

Same cliff, looking straight up. Nope. Uh-uh, I wouldn’t do it.

The whole area around the ski resort is like the Emyn Muil; razor sharp rocks, little vegetation, steep cliffs and huge boulders. Even spring skiing in New England doesn’t prepare you for this.

What is also amazing is the transformation, this is only a couple of hundred kilometers or so from the verdant rolling hills of Hobbiton, and the lush flowered pools of Ithilien you pass on the road up to the ski resort.

Of course the presence of a few volcanoes in the region may be related to this. This part of New Zealand is particularly active in that regard with most of the prominent land features including the largest lake in the country being formed by volcanic activity.

Ad an interesting aside to this tour, we essentially followed the Waikato River from it’s origins draining Lake Taupo to its delta at Port Waikato, crossing and recrossing it and watching it grow and change as we moved from the start to the finish.

Ithilien

Hobbiton was the only packaged up tour site we tracked down. There are literally dozens of spots all over the country where you can see sites that are the exact locations used, or spots that are used as the basis for scenes in the films. In one of those almost spots you can visit a water fall that formed the basis for the Hidden Pool in Ithilien where Gollum is captured by Faramir and the men of Gondor.

Similar falls to the set of the Forbidden Pool

New Zealand is loaded with these sorts of spots – beautiful rock strewn waterfalls and rivers. This particular one is reached from a short walk off the road that heads up to the ski areas around the volcanoes that were use in shots of Mordor, the Emyn Muil and Mount Doom.

Of course with scenes like this one being set at night you can’t really appreciate the full beauty of the locations.

This particular scene, where Sam, Frodo and Gollum are walking in a stream somewhere around Ithilien is a spot you can visit.  This is right off the road going to a second ski area.  With the exception of the water flow, which was very low from the lack of rain, the stream and spot where Gollum chases a fish is pretty much the same.  I will come back and re-edit this to add our photo in, as my pictures were lost.

Mordor

Mordor.  The blackest name in Middle Earth, one that people will not use at night or in the dark…or at all.

Its actually quite a nice area of New Zealand.

As you can see from the picture from this shot of my handy NZ Road Guide, these are real places.

Both Mordor and Mount Doom are in the Tongariro National Park.   And neither of them are particularly accessible by car.  As it was we bottomed out our Odyssey (with its seeming 3″ ground clearance) more than once just trying to get to some of these places.

The whole area is beautiful.  It is very stark with all the volcanic rock and there isn’t a lot of plant or animal life around.

The National Park is a favorite of hikers and back packers, and it is really the only way to get a good closeup view of some of the volcanoes.

Just a bit to the left, past the bunny slopes.

Dagorlad

The plains where the battle of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men fought Sauron was also filmed at the same ski resort where Gollum attacked the hobbits in the Emyn Muil.   This scene occurs at the very beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, where Isuldur cuts the ring from the hand of Sauron.

Apparently the closeups and cut scenes were filmed on these rough gravelly slopes and then thousands of CGI Elves and Orcs were added to complete the battle.

OK, for the purists and nitpickers this isn’t actually IN Mordor, but its right in front of it.  Its close enough.

Mount Doom

The flaming, erupting iconic Mount Doom in the movies is based on real life volcano Mount Ngauruhoe.  I can see why Tolkien changed the name to Mount Doom, he probably couldn’t pronounce it either.  It too is a steep sided cone and is a bit difficult to get to.  We didn’t actually get all that close to it, as the only way to do so would be to take a rather long hike known as the Tongariro Alpine Crossing which is about a nineteen kilometer (12 mile) one way hike through fairly rough territory.  None of the driving roads into the park come all that close to it, at least no roads we could get to in our minivan.

The Tongariro Alpine Crossing is a challenging hike over active volcanoes, rugged and sometimes steep rocky terrain; you need a reasonable level of fitness.

Eruption hazard remains in the Active Volcanic Hazard Zone on the northern side of Mount Tongariro. Observe the warning signs in place. Know the volcanic risks and what to do in an eruption.

We really weren’t dressed for it and we didn’t have a ride at the other end.  Though to not quite plead total wimpiness, we have done similar volcano hikes before though there wasn’t any snow there.  Nor were there guides.  Or sandwiches.

Mount Doom, without the great runnels of flaming lava.

You can’t have just one picture of Mount Doom.

The real life Mount Doom has snow on it much of the year, but it is still considered quite active.  As are all the volcanoes in the area, the most recent eruption was less than eight years ago.  Hikers are cautioned to be aware of the risks and there is extensive seismic monitoring to guard against eruptions.  I say “guard against” in the sense of “be ready for” rather than “actually be able to do much about”.  From reading the material in the Tongariro Park visitors center it is clear the major Volcanic Mitigation Strategy is to Get Out of Dodge as fast as you can because there isn’t a whole lot you can do when mother nature acts up like this.

It would be very, very cool to get a more closeup look at Mount Doom but I fear that isn’t in the cards for us this time around.

Other Places / More Touring

There are many, many more movie locations to see in New Zealand.  Around Wellington at the South end of North Island are many sights, with the actual studios in Wellington that New Line used for filming on sound stages as well.  Of course nothing is really left in some of those places as the filming is long done.  For this trip to head to Wellington would have added another three or four hours of driving beyond the driving we’d already done.  With almost four hours to Auckland, then a few hours South to Hobbiton and a few more hours South to Mordor we really had done quite enough driving for a five day expedition.

South Island, which is considerably less populated and more wild than North Island, is the site many more spots for the Tolkien Tourist.  Maybe when we come back for South Island we can see some more then.

I would like to add that none of this would have been possible without the Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook by Ian Brodie.  We purchases the smaller pocket edition of the book which gave a very succinct overview of the sites and gave excellent directions and descriptions of what to look for.

I’d be doing anyone that is interested in this sort of touring a big disservice if I didn’t plug his books!