Location: Middle Earth (aka Deer Park Heights)
29th April, Queenstown, New Zealand
It's so easy to think, when watching the Lord of the Rings movies, that it must all have been filmed in largely inaccessible and remote locations. Some scenes were, for sure, but some of the more memorable scenes in The Two Towers were filmed just 10 minutes away from Queenstown in a place called Deer Park Heights. How close? How about this:
Deer Park Heights is free to walkers but costs $20 for car drivers. If that seems steep, so are the roads, so you'll not regret paying the dollars, trust me. Along the way up to the summit are various animals that look at you dumbly as you drive by, as if you're the first person in a car to take that route. Not surprisingly, there are quite a lot of sheep roaming the hills, and our first stop of the day was to buy a tin of sheep nuts and feed the woolly soon-to-be sunday roasts. For a dollar you get a full tin - a tin large enough for a sheep to get its head in, we know this for a fact - but don't just waste it on the sheep. We spent quite some time feeding the sheep, teasing the sheep (I walked around rattling the tin as a group of 8 sheep followed me, like I was the Pied Piper of Hamlin or something) and throwing the food over a fenced area to a group of testy horses and the world's ugliest looking pigs. To think we came all the way round the world to feed a bunch of animals we could see in any farm in the UK. Exotic, eh?
Manda feeding the sheep ...
... and Ian teasing the sheep.
"I'm the king of the world! I mean sheep!"
We continued up the stony tracks until we met our next feedees - a group of goats. This lot really tried our patience. They knew the sound of the rattling tin all too well, and were all over us like stink on goat poo. It began with some agitated noises (something like a cross between a burp and a bark) and then seconds later the larger goats were standing up and putting their hooves on my chest. With that I dropped the tin, and they were all after it, scrum-down style (even the goats are into rugby over here). I tried to get the tin back, discovering that it was also large enough for a goat to get its head right into. It was a real struggle trying to pull the goat out of this tin - both arms around the neck, pulling as hard as I could - but I eventually managed to retrieve it, conscious that just one angry goat could do a lot of damage with his horns given how close I was to the scrum. We decided not to encourage them any further and carried on past the deer, a pair of curious-looking llamas who weren't inclined to move off the stony track for a trifling Toyota Hiace until we got to the eastern summit.
The Remarkables
The view from Deer Park Heights is phenomenal: 360 degrees all round, taking in Queenstown, Frankton and The Remarkables mountain range. The Remarkables are definitely appropriately named, but we felt a little cheated not seeing them with snowy caps (as all the pictures in all the guide books and postcards show). However, even without the snow the following picture might seem familiar to Lord of the Rings fans:
The Remarkables range, Queenstown.
Need a little help? In The Two Towers, the Rohan refugees were seen making their way round this small patch of water, with the mountains in the background, shortly before being attacked by the orcs riding wargs. All of the battle scenes were filmed here, including the ledge that Aragorn was dragged over (only the ledge is only a few feet deep on the other side - no river below!). We stayed for a while, taking photos of each other supposedly clinging on to the cliff for dear life.
Ian trying to look like he's clinging on to the cliff for dear life, not
standing on a soft patch of grass just below this piece of rock.
We made our way around both the eastern and western summits, constantly spotting photo opportunities, before heading back down again, once more passing the bad-tempered goats (I filmed another couple getting a tin of food, blissfully unaware what was about to happen to them). We still had some food to give away, so the sheep got fed/teased one more time. Amazingly, we managed to spend almost 4 hours on this hill, feeding, taking photos and imagining scenes from Lord of the Rings.
Glenorchy
We then made tracks for a place called Glenorchy, another place listed as a LOTR location. On the way from Queenstown to Glenorchy are some first-rate views across Lake Wakatipu - a very scenic drive indeed.
Once we got to Glenorchy we tried to get to the location that Isengard was filmed. Admittedly, it would not look anything like the film (after all, the tower was all digitally added), but it was still worth a go. Then it was back to Queenstown once more, desperately hoping that we would not run out of petrol (Glenorchy's only petrol station had closed for the evening and we spent the last 15 minutes watching the fuel warning light come on and off depending what angle we were on the road). We'd done most of what we wanted to in Queenstown, and so at 7:30pm we decided to make tracks for Milford Sound, just under 300km away. Any travel that we could do tonight would reduce travel time tomorrow.