Boxing Day

Boxing Day is the day after Christmas, a legal holiday in NZ. We have asked perhaps a dozen Kiwis what it is that Boxing Day celebrates, and no one has even the slightest idea, not even a conjecture. (The Boxer Rebellion was it?). The whole nation remains en holiday, nonetheless, most everything closed, as on Xmas day. Few if any post-Xmas sales here, at least in the small towns. We thought the Thai and Nepalese were holiday-happy!

After breakfast at the campsite, we walked for an hour or so through the beach-side forest at Waitarere, more woodland scenes from LOTR, particularly TTT and ROTK. Waiterere is a government-owned but privately-managed forest. We have passed many such forests in our travels here—they are easily identified, commercially-viable trees, tall, straight, not the local weird stuff; in some cases immense forests with little undergrowth. Ideal for filming certain kinds of woodland scenes involving short people. The clear-cuts are immense too, the largest I have ever seen, including Oregon. We then drove on in the direction of Wellington. “Wellywood” as some now call it..

The Otaki Gorge of the River Hutt is said to be a beautiful place, up in the southern mountains, another place where a variety of LOTR scenes were shot, particularly from FOTR, so we cut off the main road there. It is an 18k drive, mostly on unsealed (gravel) one-lane road above the gorge. Initially, we thought we'd be the only people back that far from the beach, but, no, there were more than a hundred vehicles coming and going and parking at the tramp sites, the picnic sites, the campground sites,the fishing sites, the caretaker sites, etc. Boxing Day, mate. We barely saw the river and gorge, but the foliage en route, especially the green tunnel, was extraordinary.

From Otaki, actually from Levin, the northbound highway was bumper-to-bumper, Wellingtonians escaping to the northwestern beaches for the long holiday. Fortunately, the southbound lane was fairly open and free, and thus, after 40km or so, we entered gorgeous Wellington, the capital, on a bright and clear but not even warm afternoon. We are at the Apollo Motor Lodge, smack downtown, a few blocks from Te Papa, the national museum. Dinner is store-bought New World roast chicken with salad and Xmas pudding and cream custard. Yum. Mussels from the pictured bin tomorrow night. I am not sure what Vicki will have.

Today we did a day tour with Wellington Movie Tours, seeing the various Wellington and Hutt River LOTR sites...Isengard, Rivendell, the shortcut to the mushrooms, the Weta Cave, Peter Jackson's studio complexes, and on and on, perhaps two dozen in all. Moving from site to site, we saw clips aboard the bus and then also via laptop clips in the field so you could see exactly how the site was done, filmed, etc. It was a great tour, highly recommended, and affordable t

Watch out for Orcs!

Approaching Welllington on the M1

That's 75 cents a pound for these puppies!