Day 16: Middle Earth, and then Lake Ohau
I cannot lie. One of the reasons New Zealand appealed to me was that it was the setting for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. What can I say? I'm a geek.
Jackson loved the Tolkien books, and long ago he knew that New Zealand would make the perfect setting for the movies. Shooting there proved not only economical but perfect, offering the variety of landscapes necessary to evoke all the varied fantastical destinations from the books. The Lord of the Rings movies, along with Whale Rider, are by far the most ambitious and successful films ever to come out of that country, and most people there regard them as national treasures. Everywhere we went, we ran into Kiwis who had worked on the film in some capacity. It seemed like the entire nation served as Peter Jackson's cast and crew.
Not surprisingly, tours have sprung up to capitalize on the worldwide interest in the movie. I was a bit embarrassed to sign up for one, but the literature convinced me it would be a good overview of the major landmarks around Queenstown if nothing else, and any movie trivia to arise would be a bonus. Our Kiwi tourguide picked us up in a Range Rover Discovery with Lord of the Rings stickers painted on the side, and our quest began.
Inevitably, the actual shooting locales, when viewed in person, lacked the element of fantasy which CGI had painted in for the movie. Our first stop was the place where Arwen summoned the raging river that took the form of a stampede of horses to flood the Black Riders. What we saw was barely a river, more a stream. They actually shot the scene at two different locations. The images of Arwen standing in front of the cliffs, chanting the spell, weren't shot here at all. Peter Jackson and crew used a few jetboats to create the initial surge of water that was the head of the flood.
We visited the river where Aragorn and company canoed past the Pillars of Argonath and marveled at how tiny it appeared in person; looked upon the mountain range named The Remarkables, its craggy stone face carved by glaciers and used as the walls of Mordor (what a great name for a mountain range); drove along the cliffside path which that Frodo and Sam walk to Mordor in Return of the King; and gazed at the field where Aragorn and friends fought the wolves in The Two Towers. All were beautiful, and yet, comparing them to the images in my mind's eye, painted by Peter Jackson and his cast and crew, I couldn't help but marvel at how they had seen in this landscape the potential backdrops from which all of Middle Earth could be concocted.
Most of these locations and their roles in the LOTR trilogy can be found in the book which all the tour guides were working off of, the Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook by Ian Brodie. Enterprising visitors to New Zealand with time to spare and a proclivity for self-guided exploration would be best served by using this guidebook to devise their own LOTR tours. It would be cheaper, certainly, though the local guides have the advantage of knowing the routes to the best vantage points, not all of which are obvious. Our guide had a three-dimensional map of the Queenstown area that had pop-up cardboard and plastic versions of key set pieces from the movies superimposed on a map of Queenstown. Not sure where you'd buy one, but that was probably the easiest way for me to visualize the film locations.
Out tour guide, likely notified by his boss that we came from a tour group with high standards and were to be given deluxe treatment, seemed nervous the whole time. I felt somewhat bad. It's hard to feel too mean-spirited towards Kiwis, they're all so friendly, and I was conscious of the sterotype of the self-centered, high-strung, demanding American tourist. We all took it easy on him.
After the tour concluded, we hopped aboard the bus and left Queenstown for good. A few days in Queenstown had been just enough to sample off its resort offerings. We headed for Christchurch using the inland route, taking the Lindis Pass. Along the way we stopped in the town of Omarama, though I've since forgotten what we did there.
It was, for once, an overcast day, and blustery, but on our drive to our final stop for the day, Lake Ohau, the sun fought through the clouds to give us a brief and shining view of Mount Cook off in the distance. Lake Ohau Lodge, set alongside the lake, reminded me of ski lodges I'd stayed at near Lake Tahoe back in the states. Upon arrival, and while settling into our rooms, Stefan somehow put his hand through a window and had to get bandaged up by Johnny. That Stefan was a walking accident.
Rachel and Kerryn and I took a stroll to the lake to take in the view of Mount Cook and to gaze on the still blue waters at its feet. Later, back at the lodge, Ange let me borrow her phone so that I could ring several restaurants in Christchurch to try and arrange a group dinner for the next evening, a Valentine's dinner for our group.
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The highlight of the evening, besides a pleasant group dinner in one of those cozy lodge dining rooms decorated with deer and moose heads, was an epic ping pong match. There was a ping pong table in a corner rec room at the end of the hall from our rooms, and we borrowed paddles from the bar in another part of the lodge. These were the dimpled paddles of yore, commonly provided with starter ping pong tables from sports department stores or at bars, the rubber on either side as hard and thing as the wood paddle hitting surface itself (1).
Of course, Corinna wanted to challenge me to a best 2 out of 3 singles match. Back in high school, I was a decent ping pong player. We had a table in our basement then, and I played fairly frequently with my friend Rick. Thanks to a classical training in tennis, my ping pong grip was of the American or shake-hands variety, what is referred to in tennis as a Continental grip. Had I been raised in Taiwan, like my parents, I'd undoubtedly have the more aggressive penholder grip (and oftentimes I wish I had just such a grip, its exotic and unnatural style marking, for me, true insiders of the sport). But not having played much in the ten plus years since, and facing someone in Corinna who had much more recent practice in hitting spherical objects with a racket held in one's dominant hand, I was overconfident.
I knew right away I was in trouble. My strokes, honed with the new style paddles with thick rubber sponges on both sides, the kind that imparted heavy spin on the ball, were ineffective with the old school dimpled paddles. I was hitting everything out. Meanwhile, Corinna made like another of her German compatriots, Steffi Graf, and would leap off the ground while pounding huge forehands, her blond locks whipping about. She took game one, and I felt the pressure, mostly because I knew she realized she could beat me.
We were both soon drenched in sweat and stripping down to t-shirts and tank tops, screaming and pumping our fists after winners. I bore down to claim game two, and it went to a third and deciding set. I don't remember the scores, but I remember having to grope under sofas and pianos each time our lone ping pong ball rolled away. The entire room was one giant ping pong ball trap.
In the end, I succumbed in game three. Losing to a girl is never fun, but I had learned long ago that competing with Corinna would be bitter medicine for my pride. Fortunately, despite being a fierce foe, she was always a generous sport and modest in victory.
After our match, not yet sated and adrenaline still pumping, I taught her the forehand drill, the one I'd seen on TV programs in which 8 year old Chinese kids would trade cross court forehands at a tempo best described as presto, hovering over the table to take each shot on the rise, paddle slightly inclined down, each shot returned with a slight upwards windshield wiper motion initiated primarily by flexing the elbow. We tried to see how many shots we could trade in one rally. You might think we'd quickly tire of such a silly drill, but the inherent pleasure of getting into a groove, trading forehands at a faster and faster tempo, finding that perfect arm slot so that each shot is taken quicker and quicker off the bounce, the soothing metronomic tap-tap tap-tap tap-tap of the ball off table and paddle, table and paddle, like the galloping of a horse...it was addictive. We did this for nearly two hours, nary a word between us except an occasional “C'mon!” to urge the other one on when his or her concentration was lapsing. I think our high score was 37.
It was dehydration more than anything else that finally convinced us to return the paddles to the bar where the remaining stragglers were still up and playing spoons or shooting pool. The son of the owners of the lodge was the bartender, and living out here with only his parents to keep him company at the lodge had clearly fostered in him a powerful craving for company. He tried very hard to project this too-cool-for-school attitude when shooting pool with his buddy against Jehan and Coby, twirling his pool cue like Tom Cruise in The Color of Money. He rubbed me the wrong way, and I challenged him to a singles match at pool after he and his partner beat Jenah and Coby, but he declined and said he was bored with pool.
Eventually everyone went to bed, but I couldn't sleep and stayed up late importing video clips from my camcorder to my laptop and listening to tunes on my iPod until two or three in the morning.
Next: Last stop, Christchurch
1 Later on during my sabbatical, while in a sleepy town in Argentina, I read an article in The New Yorker about the rift in the ping pong world between advocates of the old dimpled paddles and the new thick rubber sponge paddles. It's similar to the argument for wood bats in college baseball, wood or non-widebody graphite rackets in tennis, and limits on driver technology in golf. Dimpled paddle advocates argue that the new thick rubber sponge paddles have ruined shotmaking in table tennis, allowing players to put so much spin on the ball as to fundamentally alter the sport. Graphite rackets in tennis helped to usher in the era of Western forehand/two-handed backhand power baseliners who regularly hit winners from the baseline even when their opponents stand on the opposite baseline (think Bjorn Borg on steroids, Ivan Lendl, Jim Courier, and the premier practitioner of the power baseliner style, Andre Agassi). Graphite rackets haven't gone away, and neither, I suspect, will thick sponge rubber table tennis paddles. I could have used one against Corinna.
Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook by Ian Brodie
You can take one of the many organized Lord of the Rings tours, but a much cheaper alternative would be to purchase a copy of this book and do it yourself. Most of the tour I went on was just material regurgitated from this book anyway.
Lake Ohau Lodge: we stayed here overnight. Nice accomodations, and just a short stroll from the lake with a view of Mount Cook in the distance.