Where are the posts?

Just a quick note to explain the silence of this blog.  I'm sorry about not having the posts up, but internet has been a little bit of an adventure as of late, and I'm not able to upload pictures to the blog.  Hopefully when we go up to the North Island things should be better.  I certainly have my work cut out for me...

New Zealand (Day 2)

Today we visited the Pelanor Fields.  The primary problem was that it was a drizzly, damp day, thus I refused to risk my camera even for such an area as Pelanor Fields.  Lucky my mother has a rather less expensive and slightly more waterproof camera and obligingly took pictures of the fields and of us.  Doing stuff.  :)

To see the fields we first had to drive from Methven to Twizel (pronounced twy zel), which is about two and a half hours' drive.  I must say that the scenery along the way is very much like British Columbia (which we visited this past summer).  Plains followed by mountains followed by plains and then more mountains.  Throw in the occasional moutain lake and you have New Zealand and BC.  We stopped at a mountain lake for a stretch and a few pictures.  The frustrating thing about wide angle lenses is that people get in your pictures very easily.  I had to wait for a while before being able to take my pictures.

Anyways.  Now for the good bit.  Pelanor Fields.  There actually wasn't all that much to see; all it is is a large flat field with some mountains behind them.  We did get to see how some of them were used as the backdrop for certain parts, but because the Pelanor Fields in the movie have the cliffs and crags of Minas Tirith on one end and the mountains bordering Mordor on the other, those mountains were cut in from other parts of New Zealand.  However, we did get to have a bit of a behind the scenes explanation for how it all was filmed; our driver had been one of the drivers employed to transport the massive numbers of extras they had on set and he got to watch it all being filmed.  He explained how all the horses were used, how freakishly difficult it was to get various shots.  The scene of Theodin's rousing speech before the charge, where he clanks all the spears with his sword, took two days.  All because the actor was left handed and had a hard time hold the sword in his right while banging it against spears.  Then the scene where Faramir and his company ride out to take Osgiliath took two or three days as well; getting the horses to stand in a line like that was nowhere near as easy as it looked.

We drove up to the rise where the Rohirrem charged from, and there our guide pulled out some swords, flags, and helmets, and let us all stand in a line and shout "DEATH!" just like in the movie while he took a picture.  Unfortunately there were no spears but it still worked as well as could be expected.  Then we drove back down to the fields and he accelerated the van along the road which the camera cars used to the speed at which the cavalry charge would have been.  It didn't take much visualizing to imagine the Rohan cavalry racing across the plains beside us.  Then we stopped and reenacted Eowyn's duel with the Witch King of Angmar; Jordan played the role of the Witch King and Abigail played Eowyn.  Patrick, somewhat obviously, was Merry and Charlotte, my dad, and I were orcs.  An interesting note about the orcs: all the weapons the orcs had (the extras, that is) were plastic.  Same with all the armour.  So us three orcs got rubbery heads to put on and plastic swords, Patrick and Abigail got appropriately coloured cloaks and real swords, and Jordan got a rubber form of the Witch King's mask, a black cloack and the Witch King's sword (which was a pretty sweet sword).  The guide then moved us around as the scene went, with my mother taking pictures of all of us.  I have newfound respect for those extras who played the roles of orcs...you can't see a thing in that mask.  I can't imagine trying to fight a battle in it (which is pretty much what they did as the film crew filmed it).

After we were done with that we headed back to Twizel and drove the remaining hour and a half to Wanaka, where we checked into a bed and breakfast place with a special hobbit room, complete with slightly oversized beds (to make us feel small) and a round door.

As a side note, I know this is up late, and that I haven't even started today's entry, but it's really late and I do need sleep (remember, my spirit animal is the koala.  I need at least twenty hours of sleep each day.  I've only got eight so far today and there's just an hour left).  Tomorrow we don't actually have a tour anywhere so hopefully, in between my reading (Calvin's Institutes is especially hard to read when in New Zealand), I'll get today's post up.

Here are the pictures, with a few annotations.  They are all taken by my mother, with the exception of the group shot. Enjoy.



Pelenor Fields  The road is the track the camera car ran on.



That small mountain in the center is direction behind Gandalf as he and Pippin ride into Gondor, coming from Rohan.  Only it has snow on it.

DEATH!



This is up on the ridge the Rohirrem charge from, overlooking Pelanor Fields.



Merry to the rescue



That raindrop chose a very inconvenient location, don't you think?



New Zealand (Day 1)

Today was the first of several tours of Lord of the Rings locations, specifically, Edoras.  The location at which Edoras was filmed was the most remote and most expensive location in the whole trilogy.  It's certainly easy to see why, as it is about an hour away from the nearest town, that being Methven, and it is a rough 4WD trip to the location.  Add to that the fact that it is located between two mountain ridges, and thus has screaming winds almost constantly, and you have one awful place for filming.

Anyways, the day was pretty straightforwards, really.  We got picked up from Methven at 10:30 in the morning, drive ten minutes out to another village, the name of which escapes my memory, to pick up another two people and also have a half-hour break (our guide and one person had come from Christchurch, which is an hour and a half away from Methven).  It was at this point that I took my required fence-post picture; my mom likes to say I'm more interested in the rocks and the fence-posts than I am in the surrounding scenery (which is generally amazing).

Okay so maybe I cheated a little on the requirements and took in some of the scenery as well.  So sue me.

Moving along in the tour, we got to a nice vantage point to see what we had come to see.  The mother of all fence-posts!  Obviously I'm joking.  Really it was a rocky (cough cough) hill upon which stood the golden hills of Edoras.  After taking a few pictures from such a distance that the hill is quite possibly too far away to make for a reasonable photograph, we piled back in to make the final leg of the journey.

Try to spot where Edoras was built.  (Hint: look near the centre)

We did make a brief stop along the way to that remote hillock to pick up some items which will remain undisclosed for the moment (oooh, suspense!).  After picking our way through some particularly bumpy "roads" in a 4WD vehicle (with six wheels...) that seemed to have had its suspension adjusted to suit the ancient/medieval setting of the Lord of the Rings, we got to the base area where the filming crew and set up its base of operations.  Here our guide pulled out said undisclosed items, and we took some pictures with such undisclosed items in certain not-yet-mentioned positions as seemed appropriate.  Yes yes, I know you've probably scrolled down already to see the pictures and ruin my suspense.  Shows what appreciation there is in the world today for writing.  It's interesting considering I'm writing about one of the most epic pieces of literature ever written.

After we'd had our fun with those pictures we drove up the hill of Edoras as far as the truck could go, and walked the rest of the way, carefully dodging the landmines cowpies that were scattered all across the hill.  When we got to the top the guide more or less walked us through a few of the scenes, and pointed out two errors in the film that take place in Edoras.  He also explained that the scene where the flag rips off what thanks to serendipity; a camera happened to be rolling when it tore off due to the massive amounts of wind that race through the area, as previously mentioned.  They then realized that it was pure gold and added it in to the point where Gandalf and his crew ride in (I assume, as those two shots were probably filmed at different times).  We then got to hold a Rohirrim flag (very carefully, as there was a "gentle breeze" during our visit), take pictures of it, and basically climb all over the rock.  The view was amazing, yet familiar.  I wonder why....

This landscape here, our guide explained, was shown in the longest landscape cut in the movie, just after Aragorn recovers from his tumble off the cliff.  The camera sweeps across from beyond the right side of this picture (where Aragorn was sitting on his horse), over that ridge and across that valley.  Just to the right of that small cluster of trees on the left is a gap in the mountains, in which they placed Helm's Deep in that scenic shot.

And there you have it.  Edoras.  Following are some other pictures I took during the day.  They're more or less in chronological order.

Sydney, Australia (Day 3)

I apologize for not putting this up two days ago (maybe yesterday...depends where you are in the world) like I should have.

The day in question here (Thursday, March 24) was spent at the Taronga Zoo.  As I'm reasonably pressed for time here, I'll just give the highlights quickly and let the pictures do the rest of the talking

• View of Sydney Harbour on the ferry ride and from the zoo.  Wow.
• Koalas.  That's it.  Koalas.  They are awesome.  (You know how people are said to have "spirit animals"?  I think the koala is mine.)
• Kangaroos, wallabies, emus and so on.  Those guys are pretty awesome too.  Somewhat frustratingly they'd walk to the opposite end of the exhibit no matter what I did.  So I've just got the lazy ones who were resting.
• It's an old joke (old as the earth) but the platypus.  It's like a mini beaver that was cross-bred with a duck.  And if you get what the joke was you get one virtual cookie.
• Bird show.  We always seem to go to bird shows no matter what zoo it is, and the same tricks and routines are starting to become a little repetitive.  But it's still really quite something.  And then having an Andean Condor swoop over your head en route to the stage is nothing short of amazing.
• Meerkats.  These little guys are, in my mind, classed like otters, which, in turn, are like perpetual puppies out in the wild.
• Gorillas.  They're always fun to watch, and having a zoo keeper explaining the hierarchy of the family group and why certain things are happening makes it all the more interesting. 

And that's it.  There were, of course, a lot more animals, such as lions, snow leopards, snakes, lizars, seals, giraffes, zebras, elephants and so on and so forth.  They may or may not be in the pictures below (the number of which has been trimmed down somewhat.  I originally had forty-two but I realized that's probably too much).

Today we'll be visiting our first of the Lord of the Rings sets, although I'm not sure which one it is.  I will say though that New Zealand is absolutely amazing.  We're staying in Methven for a few days, a small village with less than 1400 inhabitants.  According to Wikipedia it served as a base for cast and crew when Edoras was being filmed, so that may be where we're going today.  Wouldn't be too surprising, as we're on some massive plains with a mountainous ridge on the horizon.

Enough of that, though.  You'll see that tonight (tomorrow?).  I hope.