Welcome to Paradise
Kia Ora! That's something the people in New Zealand kept saying to me during my recent trip there. As far as I can tell it's the Maori version of 'Aloha' or 'What up?' and has nothing at all to do with economy-sized motor vehicles of a similar name.

Due to my luck in a campus essay contest last December, I won a Kiwi Experience bus pass to explore New Zealand's South Island, travelling counterclockwise and beginning and ending my journey in the little kiwi town of Christchurch. None of that really matters though, although the counterclockwiseness of my trip did seem to throw me a bit as I am much more accustomed to travelling clockwise, in more of a London, Paris, New York direction. But hey, everything is all topsy turvy down here, so what are you gonna do? Just have some fush and chups and go with it.

Right, so there were whales and seals and dolphins and beaches and fiords and I heli-hiked a glacier and it was all spectacular and amazing and a life-changing experience that I'll never forget, blah blah blah, epiphany epiphany, and then we get to the good geeky stuff. Queenstown. Peter Jackson territory.

Long before there were any hobbity associations with Queenstown, it was still quite a place. The scenery, namely Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables, are exquisite. From here you can bungy jump from a tin can high in the sky, hang glide, sky dive, hike for days along the Routeburn Track, go canyoning, jetboating, and endanger your body in a number of other ways. There are also some great bars, nightclubs, restaurants and plenty of shopping.

Hollywood's Little Eco-Friendly Kiwi Cousin
Since Peter turned New Zealand into one big Wellywood backlot though, it's hard to look out a bus window anywhere in the country without feeling like you've seen it all somewhere before, and with the number of movies being filmed there now, you're going to see a lot more. While I was in Queenstown I decided I may as well have an official look at it all and signed up for the Paradise Found Lord of the Rings tour.

The four hour guided tour costs NZ$89 (which includes a free cookie and cup of hot chocolate, with two marshmallows, at a local pub) and gets its name from the main destination, Paradise Forest. Seeing as how tourism in New Zealand is up about 20% since the films first appeared, I expected a tour like this to be wildly popular, and was surprised to find only three other people in our tour van, all female by the way. Are chicks really just as geeky as guys, or were we all hoping to find some Orlando Bloom momento along the way? Perhaps a strand of long blond hair caught in a tree branch. I can't be sure. Maybe we were the only four people in Queenstown who preferred to spend the day driving around in air-conditioned bliss taking in the countryside rather than jumping off of bridges with garbage cans over our heads or hurtling through white water rapids on little boogie boards.

The tour began with a ride out toward the town of Glenorchy. Several, which is to say dozens, if not hundreds, of the horses and riders who were seen as the refugees of Rohan and in other bits of the films, came from this area. What I found most interesting is that many of them were female, dressed in beards and wigs to look like men. Even more exciting is that all of the nine Black Riders were female*. Ha! (*This is according to our tour guide, who I did not force into a lie detector test or to sign any kind of legal document promising that all her anecdotes were true. So if you are a male who played a Black Rider, my apologies. Her name was something like Tamara, so you should find her and give her a menacing talking to.) The reason is simply that at the time of year the filming was going on, the men were working the fields and the farms and all that, and didn't have any time to spare.

Faramir appears and takes the three prisoner, and in this shot you can see the bush to the left of where I am laying is the same bush in the screenshot. Woo hoo! A famous bush! That's my $89 at work.

Peter Jackson supposedly picked this location because in the background you can see all these dead trees, just big sticks really, pointing up in the air, and he thought it had the feel of a land where something evil is coming and things are turning ugly. Well done, Peter.

From here we were taken to a big field in Paradise where Gandalf was seen swiftly riding his white horse. Also around here, our guide said there had recently been another film crew tramping in the woods and big signs with "KK" written on them, leading the locals to suspect that some King Kong action was going on. This area has also been used for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so remember these trees.

It was also in this field where Isengard and the Tower of Orthanc was computer generated. How did they pick this field? Who knows, but the Remarkables do make a nice backdrop.

Look familiar?

Voila! Instant CGI evil!

This is where the tour got a lot less specific, with the commentary running something like, "Remember that scene where Boromir is shot with the arrows and dies? Well that was done way over there, where we can't get to, but those trees are the same kind as these trees over here, so let's go look at those."

Boromir died here. Kind of.

To be fair, the movies were shot in so many locations that you could probably spend weeks traversing the North and South Islands and not get to every single one of them, particularly the ones where cast and crew had to be flown in daily by helicopter.

(Our guide did point out one of these places, high up on a mountain that was in the distance from where we were driving, where she said they filmed the scene where Frodo drops the ring in the snow and Boromir picks it up. Apparently, Sean Bean refused to ride in a helicopter and instead spent two days hiking up to the location, then camped there. "What a man," I said. "What an idiot," she replied.)

All the same, I was a bit disappointed not to see more actual filming locations. We did one other nice walk in the woods, right at the beginning of the Routeburn, but hearing that this forest looked just like the one they used for some of the elf scenes just wasn't as exciting as it should have been.

Aaaand... Survey Says!
As a LOTR tour, Paradise Found was passable. As a scenic tour of the Queenstown area it was stunning. My celebrity fetish may not have been satisfied, but I never got tired of staring at the snow topped mountains, (something my brain had trouble taking in with the 90 degree weather at ground level) the lakes, the sheep and deer-filled pastures and the perfect stony river beds. I honestly started to believe that Peter Jackson's real intention had been to make a film that would center on showing off the New Zealand landscape, a travel documentary with a plot, and when he found the LOTR books he though, "Eh, I guess these will do."

As for the specific shooting sites, how he found some of these places, I'll never know. He must have had dozens of people walking over every reachable mile, and some unreachable ones, in New Zealand. I mean who would think, 'Gee, maybe if I go down this little dirt road for several miles, turn left into a group of trees, then hike up 1000 feet, I'll bet there's a perfect tree for Legolas to stand next to"? Maybe that's what interns are for.

Next time: I journey to the exotic and thrilling western Sydney suburbs to seek out the Coke sign from Strictly Ballroom.