Chinese New Year 2015 - Contiki Tour of North Island, New Zealand; Wellington

For my Chinese New Year Holiday this year I decided to travel south to New Zealand for part of my three week holiday.  I decided to join a tour group called Contiki for an 11 day tour of the Northern Island.  Below is a map of the main cities/towns that we visited on our journey.

We didn't drive straight up to Paihia, instead making our way through the various towns on the way.

I flew into Wellington from Nanjing via Hong Kong and Melbourne and made my way to the hotel for the first night on the tour.  Four other people started the tour with me that day; Jules, Tayla, Ryan and Lisa and we found out that there were another 15 or so that were joining us from the South Island tour making our grand total of 20.  We went to dinner all together that night at a local hostel bar.
The next day was the first full day of the tour and it was actually a free day, for excursions and other activities.  This is the day that I got to do a full day Lord of the Rings tour around different shooting spots around Wellington.  I had been unsure if I wanted to do this tour before arriving in New Zealand but I decided to do it since I know I might never have another chance to do this.

The quarry that Peter Jackson rented out for a full year to build the sets for both Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith.

One of the many filming locations of the River Anduin. This exact spot was where close-ups of Aragorn, Boromir and Legolas were taken for the Fellowship.

Our Contiki group on the full day tour. 

Isengard.  This field is where Gandalf ran through on the road racing to reach Isengard in Fellowship.

This is me and JP recreating the Gandalf/Sauromon discussion in the gardens of Isengard. 

Our next stop was Kaitoke Regional Park, which is the home of Rivendell.  But we had to wait for another group to meet up with our group so our guide sent us off to this swing bridge to have some fun while we waited for the others. 

Once the other group met up with us we all walked over to the area of the park that has been officially renamed Rivendell to help tourists find the exact film location.

Marker welcoming us into Rivendell.

Our guide Chewie showing us that where we stood there was a built walkway during the filming of the movies. Most of the sets of Rivendell had been actually built with bery little computer generated images used during the filming.

Me pretending to be an elf in the exact spot where Orlando Bloom had had promotional photos taken. 

The Gate of Rivendell, this is not the original from the movie but rather a reconstruction just placed there at the end of 2014. It had actually not yet had its official unveiling yet when we walked through it.

We had a quick lunch along the river before getting back into the van and heading to our next stop...Weta Workshop. Weta is the company responsible for pretty much doing all the models and visual effects for the movie.  They have since worked on many movies including the Hobbit movies, Avatar and Tin-Tin and were working on the new Thunderbirds TV show when we visited.

We also had a tour of the workshop where we weren't allowed to take pictures because they had props and other items on display that didn't technically belong to Weta.
After finishing at Weta we went into the center of Wellington city and drove to the top of Mount Victoria to see where some of the first scenes of the LOTR series were filmed.

When the Hobbits were being chased by Farmer Maggot and fell off a cliff they landed here and found some mushrooms.

This is where Frodo yells "Get off the road, quick!"

Where the Hobbits hid from the Black Rider, missing the tree that had been built and placed there for the movie.

 This is where our tour ended and we returned to the hotel.  Our dinner was free for us to find ourselves that night so we found a food court like area and had some nice cheap food before going for a walk looking for dessert.  We found the dessert in the form of deep fried ice cream in a night market.

The next morning we left the hotel to make our way to the town of Taupo, a five hour drive away.  See the next post for those pics.