Oyez, Oyez, the Shire!

We pushed it with an almost nine-hour driving day to get from Wellington to Matamata. We encountered some bad luck finding a decent parking spot and settled on a rest stop with other squatting campers. I asked a dreadlocked Frenchman if he knew if it was a legal spot. He said he had no idea, but since there were others parked there... We were so worn out we went with this logic and pulled out some dinner. A couple sips of wine later, we began fantasizing a knock at the door at 5am with a $300 fine. This rallied enough energy in us to pack back up and find a more legitimate spot.

Deep in the section on the bylaws of freedom camping in Matamata, our NZMCA guide book hooked us up with this unexciting blacktop square next to a rugby field. We spent the next two nights among breeze-dancing McDonald's food wrappers and squawking Indian mynas, but there was a a playground next to it!

We were in need of a rest after all the rush to the northern parts of the north island, so we hung out in Patty, watching movies and eating a lot of these candies. They are Heards, "A trusted Kiwi energy source," to be precise. With their vibrant fruitiness, they are our newest Kiwi addiction.

On Monday morning Alex woke up with giddy anticipation for our upcoming tour of Hobbiton, the location of the Shire in all of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. Until 1998 Matamata was a fairly ordinary, nondescript town in the country side. Now it has embraced the onslaught of LOTR tourism. As profits poured in, the iSite building was fully revamped to be photo worthy in and of itself.

We hopped a tour bus from here and made our way the 20 minutes out to the farm that holds Hobbiton. It is no wonder this site was chosen. The farm has huge rolling hills and makes a gorgeous, secluded setting for filming. The NZ government was so keen to have LOTR filmed here that they gave their armed forces the task of building the roads to access the set. And to protect secrecy, they instituted a no-fly zone around the area during filming, threatening lifetime loss of license to any pilot who breached the boundary.

The tour was really a glorified photo-op for nerds like us to come and pose like hobbits and as filler the guide shared behind-the-scenes trivia. There were different sized hobbit holes made, for example, to make a Hobbit look small or make Gandalf look big.

The set for the first three movies was constructed out of temporary materials like Styrofoam, but for the Hobbit it was made far sturdier to serve tourists like us for decades to come.

We could see the attention to detail in all of the props set out. Most of the plants are real and continue to have full time gardeners maintain them. The veggies were planted for the film from seed. They were given pesticides to protect them from possums and growth hormones to make Hobbits small in comparison. It took 18 months to achieve the full garden. On the other hand, they made sure to eliminate any native plants that look too distinctly NZ instead of Brittan. To make plum trees look right, they brought in foreign apple trees that are short enough for halflings and plucked off all the fruit and leaves. Then they glued on leaves and plastic plums.

The clothes on the lines were put out fresh each day of filming in order to properly mat down grass for an accurate feel. All the hobbit-sized clothes and tools were, of course, adorable.

Samwise Gamgee's!

I regret I did not witness Alex when he took in Bag End. At this time I was actually trying to stay near the tour guide and the main pack of photo takers, but my boyfriend pulled up the rear with his desire to capture every last Hobbit hole unobstructed by random German or British full-sized humans.

 He had such a stranger snap his portrait in front of Bilbo and Frodo's home. I was sad to have rushed along so much and stuck with my partner from there on out.

Admittedly, this was easy because the next stop was the Green Dragon for a alfling pint of hard cider! Our tour guide just so happened to be a grad student in music and she whipped out her flute and entertained us with "Concerning Hobbits" from the film score. She was wonderful.

Ouch!

Someone is definitely not a Hobbit.

We did get to pose inside a Hobbit home. This one, like all of them, was unfurnished: the inside sequences were filmed in-studio in Wellington.

And that was it. Just to feel Alex's boyish excitement was worth the $75 tickets for our two hours in the Shire. We headed back to Patty from there and made our way to the Coramandel for a big shift in gears.

Merci as always for giving mon anglais your efforts. Hugs and bisous!

The Queen Charlotte Track

We caught the tramping fever down on the south island in a big way and decided at the last minute to squeeze in another two nights and three days in the wilderness before jumping islands. This trip pushed our total kilometers on foot in the month of January to about 200 (about 125 miles.) 

Back in San Francisco, when psyching up for this NZ trip, Alex found this article on NatGeo's website about the Queen Charlotte Track. It just so happens to begin in Picton, the town where the ferry leaves for the North Island, so we decided to go for it.

We stopped at the iSite, NZ's network of information stations, in Blenheim (pronounced BLEN-am in Kiwi English) to get ourselves booked. This is an oddly commercial track in that water taxis are necessary to get to and from the starting and finishing points. The boat companies offer luggage transfer service, too. This meant we walked most of the way with only our day packs and met up with our big packs at the end of each day. There are also a series of accommodations that host trampers and boaters that can be quite fancy. We opted to go roots and hired a tent. 

Our cruise was filled with a handful of trampers like us and a whole bunch of folks out for a guided tour of the sounds by water. We met some retirees visiting NZ from the states. They pointed to their current home as we passed it by: a gigantic princess cruise ship. We had more time to chat with them than we anticipated; the trip to the start of the track took almost 2 hours. 

We finally hopped onto land again at Ship's Cove, one of Captain James Cook's favorite spots, according to our captain/MC. For those of you, like me, who let this history class trivia slip away, Captain Cook was a British Navy explorer and cartographer who mapped a lot of the Pacific, including Australia and Hawaii. He is said to be the first to circumnavigate New Zealand. Cook visited Ship's Cove a few times and evidently it seemed a good spot to create a monument to him. 

We met up with the rambunctious if not pesky weka immediately as we started the track. One of the Princess cruisers exclaimed "is that a kiwi?!" Flightlessness is about the only thing a weka has in common with a kiwi, but I am cutting her some slack because cruise ships probably don't have kiwi spotting at night. We had seen one of these guys our first night on the South Island and on the QCT they are ubiquitous. Some campers we met found them annoying, but I still think it's a treat to be visited by such a rare bird, even if it's only trying to steal my lunch. 

I'm not kidding about the lunch stealing. If you look closely in the shadows you'll see the weka that was just a couple of feet away from me as I ate, lurking, waiting for a caloric opportunity to strike. 

As we walked along the trail wekas would pop out of the bush just about anywhere. This one came up to check me out on a rocky beach.

This QCT is on a piece of land with the waters of the Queen Charlotte Sound on one side and the Keneperu Sound on the other, two of the Marlborough Sounds that give this region its name. The track undulates gently from sea level up through fern-laden bush to ridges that give panoramas of each sound and back down again. The track isn't hugely steep, but it is long. On the first day we did 16km (10 miles), the second day was 25km (15 miles) and the third was 20km (12 miles.)    

It took no time for us to meet one of NZ's most pervasive residents: the clapping cicada. These musical fellows are not in the deep south, but are just about everywhere else in NZ, according to our field guide. They make a couple of noises at once: they rub their legs like violins and then snap their wings in loud claps. One on it's own can be loud, and when the whole bush is full of them it feels as though the sound is taking a person over from the inside out: it is simply pervasive and overpowering. In those high points I found it entertaining to let my awareness be taken over by the three dimensionality of the sound. This was in the best interest of my sanity. Aversion would have been misery in these times. If I was 5 feet away from Alex and I spoke quietly he might see my lips move, but hear no words. This was only at peak moments, however. The intensity of their music went in waves that dropped to subtle and sporadic background notes as often as it was at full blast. 

When we were done walking on day one, Alex couldn't wait to get more intimate with the inviting blue water. He stripped down and dove in. I watched him from a bench in the shade with my book. I am all about swimming in fresh water, but when there are sea urchins hiding in the rocks, I get the heebie-jeebies. 

Our first night was in a delightful little DoC ground called Camp Bay. It had a covered "kitchen" with rain-water sinks and counter space to whip up some killer Chinese noodles. There were also flush toilets with oddly alluring air fresheners. 

The second day was a lot of ridge walking with views from high above the water. 

Stoats aren't the only invasive species kiwis try to eliminate in NZ. "Wilding pines" are a target as well. These are any pine trees that are not native to NZ and grow unwanted. I'm tempted to start embedding quotes from the DoC website on this issue because it's pretty interesting info, but I'll try to sum up. Anyone interested can go there or here to read more information on it. Basically, NZ has an ecosystem where lots and lots of species can flourish here unchecked. No other species had a chance to evolve with them as competition. Pine trees change the chemistry of the soil, hog water and resources and tend look pretty silly among the native ferns. Along the QCT trusts have funded ring barking to kill these trees off. Hence the large areas of dead pine tree skeletons standing in the midst of flourishing ferns. 

At the end of the 24.5 km of official trail on the second day we had an additional 10 minutes to walk to the warf to get our big bags and then half an hour up a huge hill and down the other side to Cowshed Bay campground. 

I have forgotten to mention until now that this particular week in the Marlborough region was sunny and hot. Hot and dry. We were covered in sticky sweat and the thought of immediately strapping on my big heavy bag and marching up a hill appealed to me not at all. I needed to cool off first.

There was no where for me to discretely strip down and change into a bathing suit, and I was already  moist and yuck, so I let my clothes come with me...

And it was good. Very good.

We made it up and over that hill to Cowshed Bay DoC site. This place is accessible by road so there were lots of caravans in there. It wasn't as nice as Camp Bay, either, but we were so worn out from all the walking that we had our noodles and went to bed before it was dark. We slept about 10 hours.

And the next day we got the hardest hiking out of the way first thing. Up the hill, down the hill, drop the bags and up the hill again. We could have paid $5 a bag to have someone else to this hill business, but we figured it'd be good for us. Ha!

And once we got to the official trail it was up even more! Finally there we were rewarded with some sweet views of both sounds. From there it was a gradual downward the rest of the day.

At the end of the trail is a little stand that sells coffee, sodas and ice creams. What a racket! Absolutely every tramper we saw come through had an ice cream. Ours was double chocolate cookie blast. The track ended with a little boat ride back to Picton where we slept soundly and woke up the next day early for the ferry back to Wellington. We took the 8 am ferry and cooked up our breakfast while we were in queue to drive on the boat.

And next up? Hobbiton!

But first, in real time, we will be starting a five day silent retreat this afternoon. We will not be talking to each other or anyone, including email, until next Wednesday 20 Feb. So until then, be well, everyone! Lots of love from Tairua.