New Zealand - Day 21

An earlier hotel breakfast today, then it was off to Arrowtown to find the Ford of Bruinen and the Gladden Fields, and to poke around the little town. The Lord of the Rings location book was a good start to finding the areas used for filming, but it wasn't detailed enough to find the exact locations. The scenery around us was evocative enough though for us to imagine the scenes being filmed there.

Arrowtown itself is a nice little town, more tranquil than nearby Queenstown, apparently unaffected by the mass tourism that Queenstown is famous for.

We stopped off at the jet boating place en route to Deer Park Heights to get some photos of the canyon we raced through yesterday.

Deer Park Heights is a high conical hill just outside Queenstown. It is privately owned land, used as a working deer farm. Cars are allowed to drive up to the top of the hill for a $20 toll. On our drive we fed some very insistent animals, including sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, ostriches, thar, deer, bison, yaks, llamas, chickens, ducks and pigs.

The farm is also a popular movie shooting location, and was used extensively for filming Lord of the Rings. This was Rohan country and the weathered grass around us made that obvious. We didn't check out all the locations as time was pressing, but I did stand on the cliff that Aragorn got dragged over in The Two Towers.

Back in Queenstown, we had a snack at the Naff Cafe before jumping onto the Skyline Gondola to travel up to Bob's Peak to a height of 2400ft for more spectacular views of Otaga valley as well as a race around the Skyline Luge tracks.

After another furkle through Queenstown stores, and an encounter with a giant kiwi bird, we went back to the hotel to eat, pack and sleep.