Day... what day are we on?... :Wellington

So the day after our trip through Christchurch, we arrived in Wellington all set for our biggest excursion of the cruise: a trip through middle earth. You see, Peter Jackson is from Wellington, and filmed several bits of the movies in the area. Nearly the moment our bus pulled out of the harbor, our guide was showing us the rugby stadium in which the first sound clips for the movie were recorded. Jackson had the fans at the game stamp on the bleachers and shout and what not, and this became the sound of gazillions of orcs preparing to attack Helm's Deep in movie 2. Oddly enough, our next stop was Helm's Deep itself:


Yes, I know it looks like a regular old quarry, but Jackson took it over, remodeled a bit using a combination of steel, wood and glorified styrofoam, and it became Helm's Deep. Then, when he was done, he took it all apart again, leaving us with this lovely quarry. That, as it turned out, is how Jackson works. He'd come in and change everything, but only after making sure he knew how to put it all back the way he found it. As a result, many of the sites from the movie look nothing like the movie anymore.

The good news is our guide was extremely knowledgable. For one thing, he was an extra in the Helm's Deep section. For another, I think he was the most Peter Jackson obsessed person I've ever met, so as we drove around through beautiful natural scenery, he told us all kinds of stories about the makings of the movies, and then helped us get our pictures set up just right so we'd take pictures of the right places. Movie or not, it was all beautiful. Anyway, here's one of four rivers used for the scenes with the gray boats at the end of movie 1:


After visiting that site, we did like the hobbits would and had a morning tea complete with scones rasberry jam. Then we took a winding road through these lovely mountains that have no claim to film fame, but are still gorgeous:


And that brought us to New Zealand's wine country. (Did I fail to mention that this was also a wine tasting tour?) So we stopped and tasted some fine wine from several local vineyards:


Having successfully tasted wine and eaten a delicious lunch, we set out to visit the Lady Galadriel. Here, you see the bridge from which she waved good by to the fellowship of the Ring:

And just behind us, right next to the bridge where Galadriel waved goodbye, is the patch of grass on which Smeagol killed his best friend to get his hands on the precious:

Incidentally, both this is the only privately owned setting for the film, and we had to walk through some poor family's sheep farm to get to it. I'd feel bad for them if I wasn't certain they were getting a little compensation for having the tourists tramp through by the busload...

Anyway, after this we went to the most completely changed cite of the day: Rivendell. More specifically, we visited Frodo's bedroom, a courtyard, and the area in which the council was held. Now, it's a lovely park filled with trees and plants and you'd never know it was Rivendell at all except for this:

And then it was time to return to the (almost) real world, where our ship waited to take us off to check out the white island...