Day 18 - Saturday. Despite the harbour view element of our “special weekend break” not quite living up to expectations, we had high expectations for the breakfast.
The Rydges hotels are famous for their award winning breakfasts. We know this because there was a notice telling us so, in every lift, on posters outside the hotel and in the information pack in our room.
Knowing we had a very early start on Sunday morning, we chose to take our time and head down to the dining room a little later. The place was heaving with people and the only free table we could find, was positioned very very close to the buffet counters.
I don’t know what it is about a buffet that turns normal people into manic whirling dervishes with no manners. It’s like they all think the food is going to run out. So there was some jostling, even a little bit of pushing and an awful lot of crowding around the counters.
There were clearly no other Brits having breakfast that morning, otherwise there may have been an outside chance of an orderly queue.
We managed to dash in during a lull, grab some eggs, tomatoes & mushrooms. I put the bread through one of those conveyor belt toast machines that never Browns them enough first time around and then burns them when you send them though again. Lottie got the drinks - juice, milkshakes and coffee. With a sigh of relief we sat down at our "barely big enough for everything we had collected", table and tried to enjoy our breakfast.
The problem was all the people, clumped around the counters. It’s very disconcerting trying to eat with someone’s bum only inches from your face. Also, I’m sure I’m not the only person on the planet whose elbows stick out a little when I’m eating. So I lost count of the number of times, my food fell off my fork as someone bashed into my arms in their desperation to get to the buffet.
Then there were the Ninja Waitresses - a multitude of young girls, dressed all in Black, darting around the restaurant.They had clearly been instructed to get any dirty crockery or cutlery off the tables and into the kitchen as fast as humanly possible and whilst I fully applaud the concept, the reality was a little bit uncomfortable.
Literally the minute the last mouthful of food was in your mouth - your plate, knife and fork were gone. Drain your coffee - cup gone. Pour your juice into a glass - bottle gone. Almost finish said juice - glass gone.
Now I’m a slow eater and I mean really slow. So I nearly lost my plate 3 times before I had actually finished, because I had put my knife and fork down for a nano second.
Through a gap in the crowds around the buffet, we had spotted a pancake making machine that we were both itching to try out. You press a button, the machine dollops out the exact amount of batter for 2 perfect little pancakes, which then move along a conveyor belt cooking as they go. At the end, they fall out of the machine and you have to be there to catch them.Lottie went first, declared then yummy, so I thought I would have a go.
While my ones were cooking, I went to another counter to get a new knife and fork (I would have reused the others had they not been whisked away at the speed of sound), popped them on our table and went back to catch my pancakes. By the time I got back to the table - the new clean cutlery had vanished and Lottie hadn’t even seen them go (hence the Ninja reference). So I went back to get another set and made Lottie promise to watch my pancakes like a hawk.
It all felt rather frantic and although there was loads of choice and the food was pretty good (who cooks mushrooms in garlic for breakfast?) - I think to describe it as “famous” and “award winning” is a bit of a stretch. I’m all about managing expectations and on that one - they may need a bit of a rethink!
After breakfast we headed into town. We had a Lord of the Rings tour booked for the afternoon so had the morning free to explore. We had a look around a few shops, saw lot’s of very pretty things at not so pretty prices and surprisingly, didn’t add anything to the growing pile of purchases, filling up my now half empty suitcase.
We decided the cable car looked like fun and made our way to the entrance and ticket office. “Where do you want to go?”, the nice, smiley, friendly lady enquired.We both looked at her blankly. “Well to be honest we’re not really sure where the cable car goes - apart from up” I admitted.She whipped out a nice little map and showed us what was on offer at the top of the hill - gardens, an observatory and a museum.Lovely - “2 tickets please”.“Singles or returns?” she asked.More blank looks. “We will need to come back down”.She smiled - “Well you can walk back down if you want - it’s lovely but it takes about an hour”Both in unison “Returns”.It’s not that we don’t like walking - we do, It’s just that we only had a few hours and needed to make an important stop at the pharmacy before meeting our tour at 1.30.
It’s interesting that things have different meanings in different parts of the world. My definition of a cable car, is a small swingy cabin suspended from above, but here (well In Queenstown anyway) they call that a Gondola - which must confuse the hell out of any Italian visitors.
So a Wellington cable car is, in fact, a type of trolley car that whizzes up the hill on train tracks. It’s a very short journey, but it gets you very high, very quickly, without scaring the living daylights out of you - so got a big thumbs up from me.
At the top, we admired the view, took lots of photos, walked round the pretty gardens, played with their human sundial and popped into the museum. It was all very lovely and there were very few people up there, so we felt like we had the whole area pretty much to ourselves.
The added bonus was that the sun had finally decided to put in an appearance, so we were warm, dry and feeling at one with the world. Attached to the museum was a small gift shop, so we spent a little while, searching for the unusual items that were unique to that particular shop. (They all have them if you look hard enough). Bingo, a couple of things that I’m not at liberty to describe, because they will make jolly nice presents!
We then discovered a gorgeous cafe with outside tables looking out over the view. So we enjoyed a couple of yummy coffees before heading back down in the Cable Car.
As I have already mentioned, we needed to find a pharmacy quite urgently and there was one right by the cable car exit. The first thing we needed was more medicine for my cold that was refusing to bugger off. It was coming and going in varying degrees of intensity, but I’m sure the previous Tuesday, when we spent all day, outside in the rain, leaving me wearing sopping wet clothes for about 7 hours, couldn’t have helped.
The next thing on the agenda was some ear plugs for Lottie. Now as I’m getting on a bit and smoke, I was vaguely aware that I probably snore a bit. But as I only ever share my bedroom with my dogs (and they don’t say much) I had absolutely no idea that I snore really really really loudly. It hadn’t reared its head as a problem until we got to Hellene’s house. In Mahurangi, Pahia and the Coromandel, we had separate rooms, so she got a good night’s sleep. But as soon as we were sharing one room together, my snoring was waking her up (which is quite hard to do as she has always been a very deep sleeper) and then preventing her from dropping off again.She had tried……. the pillow over the head, putting in her headphones and giving me a jolly good prod, all of which had failed miserably, to shut me up.
So as we were sharing a room in Wellington and would be in most of our South Island accommodation, drastic measures were required. We bought a good sturdy looking set of ear plugs and hoped that they would do the trick.
Our Lord of the Rings tour was with Wellington Rover Tours who were picking us up from our Hotel at 1.30. We are both big fans of the films, so were very excited to see some of the locations and the big highlight - the Weta workshop tour.
I’m extremely anal about time and so we were outside waiting a good ten minutes early. Luckily, Mike, our guide for the afternoon, was also early so we didn’t have to wait long. We picked up one more passenger, an American called Justin or Jamie or something beginning with J - I think and that was it - just the 3 of us.
Mike confirmed what Ross had told us the night before at dinner - Wellington was much quieter than it should be on a Saturday in November, so clearly the earthquake and subsequent weather, was keeping people away. We didn’t mind though, it was rather nice doing the tour with just the 4 of us.
Mike must have a special compartment in his brain dedicated to Lord of the Rings stuff, because his knowledge is phenomenal. He told us lot’s of stories about the filming in and around Wellington, fascinating facts and figures and loads of anecdotes about things that went right and things that didn’t.
My favourite was the stadium story. If you’ve seen the films you will know that in the big battle scenes, there is a lot of chanting and stomping and banging. Well it so happens that New Zealand were playing Cricket against England in Wellington and the stadium was filled with 35000 noisy fans. So Peter Jackson and the sound technicians went in during the “tea break”, stood in the middle of the stadium and asked for the fans help.
They asked the fans to shout certain words, all together as they flashed up on the screen. So when you hear all the men of Rohan shouting Death Death Death - it’s actually 35000 cricket fans. They also got everyone to bang on their seats and stamp on the ground, which became the sound of the Orcs army marching. Brilliant stuff.
Mike took us up to the very highest point in Wellington, where you get a full 360 view and it’s amazing how compact it is. we got to see the famous stadium from there and also the peninsular where the New Zealand film industry is situated. The drive up there wasn’t my favourite bit (big drops, no barriers) but the views were worth it.
On the way back down we stopped, grabbed our cameras and started walking along a pathway into some woods. After a few minutes Mike stopped, told us to look around and asked if anyone recognised where we were. (In some woods just up from Wellington city centre?)
Lottie got it immediately - “Its the ‘get off the road’ scene!”. Mike was impressed because we were indeed, standing in the spot where the 4 hobbits encounter a Black rider for the first time.
He showed us the relevant clips on an iPad and we recreated the scenes ourselves (apart from there being only 3 Hobbits hiding in the hole instead of the 4 in the film)In case you are not aware, Peter Jackson made all 3 films at the same time, so some of the locations used appear in more than one of the films representing different parts of middle earth. Why travel to a different location when you can just change the camera position and angle? This wood was no exception, so Mike pointed out another area that was used in a completely different part of the trilogy.
Back on the bus, we headed back into town, where we saw the Embassy Theatre, the venue for the World Premier of the Fellowship of the Ring and we then stopped at another theatre for a quick look around and to grab a coffee. This theatre (Mike’s favourite) was built by the film makers as a gift to the Wellington people for all the disruption they had caused during the 6 years it had taken to make the films. It is in Art Deco style and absolutely gorgeous.
This was also the moment when we learned about the “Flat White”.We were about to order our coffee’s and Lottie and I were discussing whether to go for a Latté or Cappucino, when Mike said - not a Flat White then? We admitted we didn’t know what that was, having never had one, so he explained it’s similar to the others but you get more coffee and less milk and was many New Zealander’s coffee of choice. So we ordered 2 Flat Whites instead and felt very “untouristy” in the process. They are actually quite delicious and contrary to their name, you still get lot’s of froth on the top.
The next part of our tour was to the New Zealand film district and to the famous Weta Studios, where all the props, make up and prosthetics were created for the films.Having dabbled a bit in stage make up and prop creation for an amateur theatre group, I was really excited about this part of the trip and expected it to be the highlight of the afternoon.Mike gave us our tickets for the studio tour and for a documentary film which shows the history of the studio and told us he would be waiting outside.We had time to look around the Weta Cave which has some models of characters and sets from the films, but is actually just a small fairly expensive gift shop - albeit quite an atmospheric one. We were allowed to take photos in here, but absolutely no-where else due to copyright.
At our allotted time, the Weta guide called for us to follow her outside and down the road a little bit to the studio itself. I was really quite shocked at the number of people that headed out with her. I knew there were going to be more than just the 3 of us, but I certainly wasn’t expecting there to be quite so many (approx 20). We all crammed into a tiny room while the guide introduced herself and explained she was one of the make up artists that work in the studios. Now whilst I think it’s a nice idea in principle, to have people who work there do the tours, in my opinion, the skill sets are not necessarily transferable. Many creative people are quite introvert and not naturally great public speakers, so all the time she was talking, I was wondering if she just wanted to get this over with, so she could get back to doing what she loved best.I cannot fault her enthusiasm or passion, but the problem was she was tiny, very softly spoken, English clearly wasn’t her first language and the children in our group wouldn’t shut up - so it was extremely difficult to hear what she was saying. The actual studio we were shown, wasn’t very big either and most of the tour focussed on examples from other projects to demonstrate how things are created and made. So for example, she explained the process for making the guns from “District 9” and then passed one round, (which took a while as there were so many of us and the kids hogged it). But if you haven’t seen the film, you have no point of reference and to be honest, I just wanted to get to the Lord of the Rings stuff. She walked us through various displays showing their design processes, animatronics and some of the costume elements like chain mail. We saw the big machines they use for making moulds and the materials they use for different projects, which was all interesting but I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. I’m not really sure what I was expecting, but this wasn’t it! After we had been in the studio for a while, it was clear that another tour had just started. We knew this, because their guide was very loud and he kept cracking jokes making his crowd roar with laughter. At this point, I sort of tuned out and along with Lottie, just looked at all the displays.
So what did I picked up from the tour? This was about the sum of it….
Weta is a very very creative and innovative company - (and it’s great to see them giving Hollywood a run for their money)
Weta try to recycle and use renewables as much as physically possible.
Mithril (the chainmail worn by elves) is surprisingly heavy.
Viggo Mortensen was a traditionalist and walked to every location (that was possible to get to by walking) in full chainmail (the heavy kind, not the plastic look-a-like)
Movie companies waste a ridiculous amount of money commissioning high tech complex items that never get used, because the project gets killed. We’re talking millions.
I definitely should have worked for a company like this either on the make up, the prosthetics or tech side.
Managing the copyright issues attached to each movie/project must be a living nightmare. For example - The Hobbit trilogy and the Lord of the Rings films were made by different companies. although many of the key players (Director & actors) and elements, (Hobbits, Elves and Orcs) were exactly the same. However every single prop, costume and prosthetic had to be made again from scratch for the Hobbit, because the LOTR company wouldn’t play nicely and share. They wouldn’t even sell them at a ridiculously inflated price. Pathetic waste of time money and resources!!!
Following the same theme, every single prop from every single project has to be destroyed after the film is wrapped up.
Lottie felt much the same as I did about the tour, although her hearing is better than mine, so she picked up a lot more information. After the tour was done, we went to little movie theatre to watch a documentary about Weta and how it was formed, which was really interesting.
I think the main problem, once again, was expectations. The part of the tour with Mike had been absolutely brilliant. We’d got completely involved and he made us feel like we were the most important clients he had ever had. We learned all sorts of great trivia about the movies, heard all sorts of interesting stuff and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Lottie remarked afterwards that if we had done the two parts the other way round, we may have felt differently. She wasn’t wrong.
Mike dropped us back at Ridges and we decided to find somewhere a little less beautiful and trendy for dinner. We found a great pub that did a mean fish & chips, at a surprisingly good price, only a few minutes walk from our hotel and as we had a very early start the next morning, went back for an early night.
This time I didn’t put my PJs on until I was absolutely sure I was done with the cigarettes, and settled down to get some sleep.Lottie (complete with sound deadening ear plugs) was asleep almost as her head hit the pillow, but even though I felt really tired, I was in the wide awake club. The hotel was quite near a busy (by NZ standards) road and there were a fair few lorries driving up and down. By the time the sound travelled up to the 10th floor, it sounded like a low rumbling - exactly like the noise the big earthquake had made. So I kept getting out of bed to see if the building was shaking or rolling. I was even tempted to get on the internet and check out GeoNet to see what and where earthquakes were happening at that moment.I eventually dropped off at about 4.00am which was a shame because we had to be up at 6.00 to get ourselves ready, have breakfast and be at the ferry port by 7.30am.
Day 19 - Sunday morning
I thought my alarm must be joking when it went off at 6.00am. It felt like I had only been asleep for a few minutes. We got up, got ready, repacked our cases ready for the next stage of our journey and went downstairs to have breakfast. I had already told reception that Bertha needed to be outside by 7.10, but went to double check anyway (I annoy myself sometimes). Breakfast was a whole different affair from the previous morning. No Ninja waitresses, no hoards of people fighting over the buffet, just us and a few other early risers. We had a lovely breakfast (apart from the garlicky mushrooms) and tried little tasters of things we hadn’t even been able to get near before. We also stole some pastries for later. Is it stealing though? I always feel like I’m doing something illicit if I walk out of a hotel breakfast with “saved for later items", in my bag. But as Lottie quite rightly said “We’ve paid for them so who says we have to eat them there”.
Bertha was waiting patiently for us outside, so we loaded her up and set off for the ferry port all ready for the next phase of our trip - The South Island..................