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First, apologies to those who got the email to my last blog 3 times - that wasn't meant to happen. Secondly, to those who may be jealous of me spending Xmas in New Zealand's summer, don't be; up to Tuesday we've been getting freak cold weather here, which is just typical isn't it?! Including giant hailstones in Auckland. Ah well, c'est la vie.

Testing manhood

Simon Wadsworth
2006-09-04 18:39:02

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all these crazy activities and masses of 'cool' boy-racers everywhere. Anyways, after zorbing, we then dried off and went to the bottom of the hill-track, laid down and waited for the next zorb ball to boom down and roll over the top of us. The reason for doing this? Because we could - the apparent philosophy of most backpackers.

Before all of that however, I put my anorak on for the day and got meself a tour around Hobbiton; or what is left of it. 13 of the 39 holes still exist, including Sam's plae and Bag End, as well as the party-tree, the lake etc. I must shyly admit, it was pretty cool. It's easy to now see where all the money went into filming. For example, the book says there was an oak tree above Bag End, so Peter Jackson wanted an oak tree. But instead of just putting an oak tree there, they found a tree which they cut into small pieces, numbered, transported and rebuilt on top of Bag End, then individually attached 250,000 fake oak leaves to the tree. And the result? About 3 seconds of film. There are plenty more extreme examples, including shipping in sheep from England, because NZ's weren't black enough. These were seen for about 2 seconds. It's safe to say Jackson was a perfectionist.

Oh, and if you like the smell of rotton eggs wafting through the air all day, may I recommend to you Rotorua. This town is a big geothermal area, full of boiling mud, steaming rocks and the usual array of spontaneous explosive events to please the Japanese tourists and me. I hitched my way to the aptly named (by George Bernard Shaw) 'Hell's Gate', which meant standing at the side of a the road with a sign saying "To Hell...please." to get a closer look at these explosive events, a giant mud volcano and the largest thermal waterfall in the Southern Hemisphere (ooOOooh). A good time for photos.

Rotorua is also the cultural centre of New Zealand, full of Mauri tribes and a similar number of tourist attractions. Seeing the Haka (War dance) up close, and pigging out on a huge Hangi feat (food cooked in the ground) which included english stuffing nearly as good as my Mum's, were part of the deal I chose. It's hard to do much here without taking part in these activities, but they have definitely been worth it.

And now you find me on the edge of Lake Taupo, thanks for Mr Ostler's recommendation, which was formed 1000s of yeard ago by a gigantic volcanic explosion (for comparison, Mount St Helens released 3km3 of material, and Lake Taupo released 300km3 of material...). Besides skydiving, I've been both relaxing and preparing for the 4-day Northern Circuilt walk through Tongariro National Park (and for the LOTR fans, where much of Mordor and the plains of Gorgoroth was filmed, though that's not the reason I'm going...Really, it isn't). This was done by taking a 7-hour walk to more steamy craters, and the noisy and powerful Huka Falls - so powerful because a 100metre wide, 4m deep channel is forced into a 15m-wide, and 10m deep gulley, soothing the muscles (no jokes please, they're there somwhere) in a thermal spa, and reading by the Lake shore, watching one of the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen, that nearly brought me to tears.

I hope you enjoy the photos; it's hard to narrow down which ones to show you. Much love, Simon

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I live in New Zealand and I enjoyed reading this article about my own country. You are very informative, even i learnt some things. You are very funny, i laughed nearly at everything.
I now like this website.

Amanda, 2006-10-18 05:58:31