Oh, Nothing Much: The New Zealand Adventure Part 6: Queenstown, Arrowtown, and Glenorchy

Lake Wakatipu

Once upon a time, Queenstown was a gold mining town. At some point down the line, Queenstown started to reinvent itself as the adrenaline capital of the world. The first commercial bungee site started here, and since then they’ve found a million other ways to give you a natural high. It’s THE resort town for adrenaline junkies.

The night we got back to Queenstown, we met up with Sabina who had just been skydiving that afternoon. The next morning she had tickets for an adventure combo pack to go jet boating, heli biking, and some other craziness all before lunch. You can also go canyoning, white water rafting, canyon swinging-- you name it, they got it. While some of the water adventures sounded fun, none of the many methods of plummeting through air held much allure for me, given that my heights seems to be getting worse by the day. (To be fair, I think Greg would have liked to go on the canyon swing – it’s exactly what it sounds like -- a bungee swing that flies back and forth across a canyon.)

No bungee or skydiving for me; or maybe I’ll wait until I’m 65 and then rumor has it, they let you jump for free. While Sabina sought out ways to keep her adrenaline levels pumping I decided to indulge my inner geek -– and I dragged Greg along with me.

With Sabina in Queenstown, after her morning of adventure sports and in the middle of our day of geekdom.

First, the history nerd got to come out to play. We began the day in Arrowtown, where we toured the ruins of a Chinese mining settlement that sprang up during a gold rush.

The rest of the town is a cute little vacation spot with restaurants and shops and I took the opportunity to pick up a few gifts for family and friends. Among the many popular souvenir items, I found the merino-possum wool blends to be particularly interesting. Bushtail possum we brought to NZ to establish a fur trade, however, with no predators to keep them in check, their population exploded, and they have wreaked havoc on the native birds and vegetation ever since. The situation got even worse when fur fell out of fashion, since hunters have no incentive to capture them. Clothes blending NZ’s famous merino wool with possum fur is still manufactured and popular there. The amazing part is that the blend is actually much, MUCH softer than plain merino wool . . . and in this case, wearing fur is actually be good for the environment. I picked up a scarf for my dad; I kind of wish I'd bought one for myself too.

We spent the second half of our day of nerdom touring Middle Earth. Yes, we geeked-out completely and took a Lord of the Rings tour. We booked a trip with a small company called Pure Glenorchy that takes you in SUV to visit the film locations in the area and they show how images were spliced together to create the world.

Lord of the Ring Tour: Queenstown to Glenorchy

Greg begrudgingly stands in for Faramir.

Borrowed from this site.

Somehow the Dead Marshes don't look quite so dead in real life.

Borrowed from this site.

You can see parts of this mountain on the right hand side of the image of Isengard. Parts of this area also served for the Misty Mountain.

This gorgeous wooded area was used for Amon Hen and parts of Lothlorien.

The weird thing was that the other group on our tour was an older Israeli family – a brother and sister and their spouses—who seemed completely uninterested in the movie information. They were very nice, but while we were trying to listen to the bits about how this image was cut with that image to create Ithilien, the Misty Mountains, Isengard or whatever, they’d all kind of gloss over. I’m not the biggest LOTR buff by far – we didn’t show up in costumes or anything . . . although I have been trying to convince Greg for years that we should be Arwin and Aragorn for Halloween. This group, however, seemed barely to be familiar with the movies – like this epic trilogy was something they heard spoken about, or maybe they saw one and then decided to take this tour. That did detract from the experience a bit.

However, the areas we drove through around the little town of Glenorchy are spectacularly pretty, and while you can buy a LOTR location guide, it would be very hard to get to a lot of the spots and it would be even harder to pick out certain locations since many images were composites of different places. Several companies offer a LOTR tour, but one thing I have to say for Pure Glenorchy’s tour, is that they provide a small lunch stop. Our tour guide brought apricot bars that his mom made and they were absolutely scrumptious!

Plus, now I can say that I’ve been to Lothlorien and to Paradise!

Despite what the sign says, it is possible to exit Paradise; however, it wouldn't mind going back.

On our way out of town later the evening, we got a chance to see some of what we might of missed when we stopped off at popular bungee bridge. I shuddered at merely looking over the edge, and then my attention was quickly sidetracked by the site of the Pillars of the Kings.