My plan for Wednesday, January 28 was to take the train from Christchurch to Greymouth on the other side of the South Island and then to take a bus up to Nelson at the top of the South Island where I would spend the night. The train is called the Tranzalpine and it makes its way across the Canterbury Plains before working its way across the Alps through a series of tunnels. I had chosen to go this route rather than to take the direct route to Nelson so that I could take the train through the Alps. The Tranzalpine has been described as one of the top five most beautiful train rides in the world and it did not disappoint. The views of the mountains and glacial fed rivers were absolutely brilliant.
The passenger train service in New Zealand is now defunct with the remaining few operating lines serving primarily as tourist trains. For example, from Christchurch, there is only one train each day to Picton as compared to the multiple busses plying the same route. There is also only one train a day to Greymouth. As the train system is no longer in regular service, the train company sold the railroad station which was in the city and moved its operations to the suburbs. Fortunately, a shuttle bus runs around to various hostels and hotels in search of people who were taking the trains and so all I had to do was to get up early and to meet the shuttle van outside. There was another hostel down the street from mine where we picked up a woman from Darwin who I wound up chatting with a lot in the van and on the train. I had booked my ticket in advance from the US and so all that I had to do was to walk into the station to get my seat assignment. The woman from Darwin and I wound up in the same train car, but at different ends. The rest of the seats in the car were taken up by a tour group from the US and I wound up sitting across from the leader of the tour group who was a man in his forties and from Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
The tour guide has led tours of NZ and Australia for years. In the northern hemisphere summer months, he also leads tours through Scandinavia and he agreed that Norway is probably the most beautiful country in the world. He was busy chatting with his group and with confirming that the hotel they were going to that night knew that they were coming. While he was chatting with someone from the hotel, he actually lost his mobile telephone signal which would have sparked a national outrage if it had occurred in Scandinavia where even the most remote regions have clear reception.
Since I aspire to lead specialty tour groups some day, I asked him about his job and what it was like to be the tour leader. Having known other people who have led tours in the world, I knew that the job was hardly a picnic. I don’t know how long this tour had been on the road, but he was open to talking with someone who was not one of his paying customers. He told me that at one time he had managed a hotel. Then one week he wound up working over one hundred hours and decided that there had to be more to life. He resigned from his position and began to work for the tour company. He said that part that he dreads the most abut the job these days are the long flights. He will usually fly to Australia a few days before his clients so that he has time to adjust. He also will lead several tours in succession so that he does not have to go back and forth from the US. In the old days, he did not care, but now the travel part of the travel grates on him.
He also said that the most difficult part of his job is the clients who are ungrateful. People who complain about the food or the hotel or about getting up early. Other people complain that the tour does not allow enough freedom which is a bit silly since it is an organized tour. People will find fault with anything and it annoys him because in his mind they are all so lucky to have the time and the money to be able to travel in the first place. He said that one just can not take the complaints personally or else it would just constantly build up to the point that one could not take it any more.
It was nice to be sitting amongst his tour group because he was full of commentary about the land that we were passing. He explained that although the Canterbury Plain is flat, it is inclined at a steep angle from the ocean up to the Alps. So during the 45 minutes or so it took the train to cross the plains, we gained a lot in altitude even before entering the mountains. One person asked about the sheep we saw out the windows and the tour guide explained that a few years ago, there were 80 million sheep in New Zealand as compared to 4 million people. He joked that at one point, he expected to arrive in NZ and find the sheep running the country. But, declining prices on the world market for wool and lamb has caused a lot of farmers to look into herding other animals and the number of sheep has now declined to only 40 million. Dairy is now growing and in fact the cheese and butter I found in Yantai, China came from NZ. Farmers are now also herding deer to sell. It was odd to pass herds of deer in pens since these same animals can be found grazing in my parent’s back yard.
I left my seat and made my way forward in the train, through numerous cars until I reached the observation car. This was a metal car without seats or windows so that we could look out on the scenery we were passing and take pictures without worrying about the glare from the windows. The only problem was that the observation car was only a few cars behind the diesel locomotive and every time we went through a tunnel, those in the observation car were left gasping for breath in the diesel fumes. At the end of the trip, I wiped my face with a white napkin and it turned black from all of the dust and soot I had collected from standing in the car for most of the ride.
I arrived just in time for the train had just started entering the mountains and soon the car was full of people. But surprisingly, the car cleared out after a short time until the only people who were left were the woman from Darwin, a woman from New York city and myself. The mountains we passed were striking, but what I found to be more amazing were the glacial fed rives that were aquamarine in color. The rivers ran in cannons that were about 100 feet deep with white sand and rocks at the bottom which made the rivers even more striking. The mountains were not so much high, tree covered affairs, but more like gentle hills with low, green shrubbery or brown grass on them. The tops of the mountains were obscured by fluffy clouds that hung low in the sky and imitated the cows and sheep grazing in the fields below. The mountain sides were stained white where runoff from prior rain storms had flowed, cutting into the earth.
We passed people out hiking or biking on trails or kayaking on the clear, blue waters. Plus there are ski fields in the surrounding mountains, all of which were only an hours drive from Christchurch. What an amazing resource for outdoor enthusiasts who live in Christchurch.
As the scenery rolled past and as I shot picture after picture (you would have been proud, Sue), we drew up to the station at the village of Arthur’s Pass. The village is nestled in one of the U shaped valleys and was originally established by railroad workers who were building a tunnel through the pass. The entire tour group got off at this stop to catch a bus to see the nearby glaciers and the woman from Darwin got off for a day of hiking. In fact, most of the passengers got off at Arthur’s Pass rather than to continue on to Greymouth.
I seriously spent several minutes debating about just getting off of the train to spend the night in the village. I had thought about it when I was planning the trip as well, but had opted to spend the day in Nelson instead. I would later regret not getting off of the train, but to do so would have meant eating what I had paid for the bus ticket from Greymouth to Nelson and canceling my reservation at a hostel that night. My later regrets about not spending the night in Arthur’s Pass were only offset by the really neat people who I would meet in the next 24 hours and who I would not have met otherwise. If not for the people, I would probably still be upset about my choice.
Once the train left the Arthur’s Pass station, it plunged into a 8,529 meter long tunnel which was the longest in the British Empire at the time of its construction in 1923. The tunnel completed the Christchurch to Greymouth rail link and was originally designed for electric locomotives. The tunnel steadily increases in grade and trains making the return trip must use two locomotives, one serving to the brake the train.
It took about 15 minutes to travel through the tunnel during which time the observation car was closed. Soon after we cleared the tunnel we found ourselves once again in hills, but ones that were not quite as dramatic as before and with more tree cover. The vegetation would become more tropical, reflecting the 5 meters (16.5 feet!) of annual rainfall the west coast of the South Island receives each year. Since we had passed to the other side of the mountain ridge, we were now following the route of the Grey River as it made its way towards the west coast of the island and the Tasman Sea. There were more signs of settlement as we passed some houses and the occasional dam. We also passed a lot of sheep and cattle and even an occasional emu ranch.
The original impetuous to build the rail line through the mountains was to be able to get the gold discovered during the gold rush of the 19th century into Christchurch. I don’t know if the source of the gold has been exhausted, but there is still coal mining in the area.
The train ride took a total of four and a half hours and we pulled into the Greymouth train station at 12:30. The train would then be making the return trip to Christchurch. A roundtrip ticket was only a little more expensive than a one way ticket, but even though the trip was spectacular, I don’t think I would have wanted to have made the trip back. However, one could also get off in Arthur’s Pass and then catch the return train to Christchurch later in the day, allowing for several hours of hiking in the mountains and which would have been a good option for a day trip from Christchurch.
The bus station in Greymouth is conveniently located in the same building as the train station and so I only had to get off the train, collect my bag from the luggage car and wait. The town of Greymouth has been described by the Rough Guide as one of the most dispiriting towns on the west coast and so I left without regretting having a chance to look about. The Intercity bus was large, comfortable and easily one of the nicest bus rides that I have ever taken. As there were only a few passengers, I could spread out and enjoy the scenery as we passed. The road took us on a ridge along the coast, affording beautiful views of the beaches below and the coastline beyond. I am very happy that I took the bus because the scenery was beautiful.
When I had looked at the bus schedule, I had wondered why the bus trip would take seven hours. I soon found out when after only 45 minutes of travel, the bus driver announced a rest stop that would last for 45 minutes at a roadside café and shop. The bus driver urged us to walk across the road to the Paparoa Nation Park which is home to the Pancake Rocks and blowholes. The rocks are accessed by walking along a trail though a short woods to the edge of cliffs that descend rapidly to the sea. According to the Rough Guide, the limestone rocks at the waters edge have been weathered to resemble an immense stack of giant pancakes created by stylobedding, a chemical process in which the pressure of overlying sediments creates alternating durable and weaker bands. The stacks of rocks, just crying for some syrup are undermined by huge caverns where incoming waves may send spumes of water sprouting up through blowholes.
The bus driver had put the fear of God into all of the passengers by warning that we only had a few minutes to see the site and told tales of passengers left behind who had been eaten alive by the Westland black petrels which breed in the area and are cousins of the albatross. (I made that last part up to see if you were awake). So a group of us from the bus quickly made our way over to the track and walked out to the rocks. I wound up walking next to Kelly, a woman from the UK and we started chatting as we made our way out to the rocks. The rocks were really neat, but we did not see anything resembling a blowhole. We asked one of the rangers working on the trails and he explained that you had to have high swells in order for the blowholes to work. Unfortunately, we were at low tide at the time which made matters worse and so we had to settle for the pancakes which were novel enough to please.
Kelly and I had been speaking about places that we had been in NZ and beyond and once we reboarded the bus, we moved to sit next to each other to continue our chat. Kelly is currently on a one year trip around the world. She had just come from Australia where she had spent several months and several months in south-east Asia before that. She would spend a good number of weeks in New Zealand before continuing on to the Pacific islands such as Fiji and Tahiti. I asked her how she was able to do this and she told me a bit about her story.
In the UK she had been working for twelve years at a big insurance company, staring in human resources. Later she had moved into web development because although the companies technical people made great web sites, they lacked the people skills to make them user friendly or to convey the message that they company wanted on the sites. Her career was going well and she had a house, a car and all of that. Then one day, she looked at her life and the routine of going to work from 9 till 5, returning home tired and only having a little time in the evening for herself. She realized that this was the rest of her life and that perhaps there was more. She decided to sell her house, her car and her belongings and to take off and travel around the world for a year while she was still young enough to be able to backpack and to enjoy it.
There are guidelines for this sort of thing and the rule of thumb for one year of travel is that you only choose two continents to concentrate on. She chose Asia and Australasia and her travel was dictated by her plane ticket which required her to always move counterclockwise around the world. She could go from Australia to New Zealand, but not back. Her final stop would be in California on her way back to the UK. However, it sounds like she will never be truly be able to go back to the normal work day again because she was very interested in the WorldTeach program or other opportunities to volunteer abroad after her travels were over. Once one gets a taste of the freedom of making decisions such as, “I think that I will go to Laos today”, the thought of a daily job with two weeks of holiday is horrifically constraining.
Speaking of Laos, the vegetation that we passed by as we skirted the coast was included palms and other tropical looking vegetation. It struck me as looking like what I would picture SE Asia to be like and Kelly confirmed that it reminded her of Laos. The abundance of dark green vegetation that climbed the surrounding hillsides is what drew the comparison.
To my disappointment since our conversation was really interesting, Kelly got off the bus in the city of Westport to sample the jet boating. Kelly had spent a night in Greymouth as well and she had said that the town was as boring as the guidebook said. She had gone to the information office in Greymouth (every little town in New Zealand has a staffed information office, full of brochures and the staff can help to book accommodations or outings), but when she had asked about things to do that might keep her in Greymouth for another night they staff had not been able offer anything and so she left. I doubt she found much better in Westport which the guidebook describes as running Greymouth close for the dubious honor of being the most dispiriting town.
After Westport, our bus left the coast and began to climb through the surrounding hills. The road made for some adventurous driving. There were times when the road narrowed to a single lane in order to make its way around a cliff with the river below us and rock extending above. There were mirrors on the side of the cliff so that drivers from each direction could see if there was a car currently making its way around the bend. There must be some rule about who has the right of way.
We passed through wooded areas that showed signs of logging. It turns out that the entire area is the largest man-made forest in the world, specifically made for the logging industry. I saw a lot of pine trees that only had branches at the very top. It was later explained to me that the lower branches were all cut away so that the trees grew straight. I also learned that the pine tree is not indigenous to New Zealand, but was brought by the European settlers.
We passed by a section of river which was used for one of the river scenes in the Lord of the Rings (bus driver commentary). The LOTR filming sites are scattered throughout NZ and it would take a persevering and wealthy person to visit them all. For example, I later met a man who had signed up with a tour of Hobbiton. He said that most of the set had been disassembled but that one could still make out Bilbo’s door and the party tree. Small concession for the $50 he paid for the privilege.
Our bus made another long stop for dinner and it was close to 20:00 that we finally arrived in the town of Nelson.
The passenger train service in New Zealand is now defunct with the remaining few operating lines serving primarily as tourist trains. For example, from Christchurch, there is only one train each day to Picton as compared to the multiple busses plying the same route. There is also only one train a day to Greymouth. As the train system is no longer in regular service, the train company sold the railroad station which was in the city and moved its operations to the suburbs. Fortunately, a shuttle bus runs around to various hostels and hotels in search of people who were taking the trains and so all I had to do was to get up early and to meet the shuttle van outside. There was another hostel down the street from mine where we picked up a woman from Darwin who I wound up chatting with a lot in the van and on the train. I had booked my ticket in advance from the US and so all that I had to do was to walk into the station to get my seat assignment. The woman from Darwin and I wound up in the same train car, but at different ends. The rest of the seats in the car were taken up by a tour group from the US and I wound up sitting across from the leader of the tour group who was a man in his forties and from Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
The tour guide has led tours of NZ and Australia for years. In the northern hemisphere summer months, he also leads tours through Scandinavia and he agreed that Norway is probably the most beautiful country in the world. He was busy chatting with his group and with confirming that the hotel they were going to that night knew that they were coming. While he was chatting with someone from the hotel, he actually lost his mobile telephone signal which would have sparked a national outrage if it had occurred in Scandinavia where even the most remote regions have clear reception.
Since I aspire to lead specialty tour groups some day, I asked him about his job and what it was like to be the tour leader. Having known other people who have led tours in the world, I knew that the job was hardly a picnic. I don’t know how long this tour had been on the road, but he was open to talking with someone who was not one of his paying customers. He told me that at one time he had managed a hotel. Then one week he wound up working over one hundred hours and decided that there had to be more to life. He resigned from his position and began to work for the tour company. He said that part that he dreads the most abut the job these days are the long flights. He will usually fly to Australia a few days before his clients so that he has time to adjust. He also will lead several tours in succession so that he does not have to go back and forth from the US. In the old days, he did not care, but now the travel part of the travel grates on him.
He also said that the most difficult part of his job is the clients who are ungrateful. People who complain about the food or the hotel or about getting up early. Other people complain that the tour does not allow enough freedom which is a bit silly since it is an organized tour. People will find fault with anything and it annoys him because in his mind they are all so lucky to have the time and the money to be able to travel in the first place. He said that one just can not take the complaints personally or else it would just constantly build up to the point that one could not take it any more.
It was nice to be sitting amongst his tour group because he was full of commentary about the land that we were passing. He explained that although the Canterbury Plain is flat, it is inclined at a steep angle from the ocean up to the Alps. So during the 45 minutes or so it took the train to cross the plains, we gained a lot in altitude even before entering the mountains. One person asked about the sheep we saw out the windows and the tour guide explained that a few years ago, there were 80 million sheep in New Zealand as compared to 4 million people. He joked that at one point, he expected to arrive in NZ and find the sheep running the country. But, declining prices on the world market for wool and lamb has caused a lot of farmers to look into herding other animals and the number of sheep has now declined to only 40 million. Dairy is now growing and in fact the cheese and butter I found in Yantai, China came from NZ. Farmers are now also herding deer to sell. It was odd to pass herds of deer in pens since these same animals can be found grazing in my parent’s back yard.
I left my seat and made my way forward in the train, through numerous cars until I reached the observation car. This was a metal car without seats or windows so that we could look out on the scenery we were passing and take pictures without worrying about the glare from the windows. The only problem was that the observation car was only a few cars behind the diesel locomotive and every time we went through a tunnel, those in the observation car were left gasping for breath in the diesel fumes. At the end of the trip, I wiped my face with a white napkin and it turned black from all of the dust and soot I had collected from standing in the car for most of the ride.
I arrived just in time for the train had just started entering the mountains and soon the car was full of people. But surprisingly, the car cleared out after a short time until the only people who were left were the woman from Darwin, a woman from New York city and myself. The mountains we passed were striking, but what I found to be more amazing were the glacial fed rives that were aquamarine in color. The rivers ran in cannons that were about 100 feet deep with white sand and rocks at the bottom which made the rivers even more striking. The mountains were not so much high, tree covered affairs, but more like gentle hills with low, green shrubbery or brown grass on them. The tops of the mountains were obscured by fluffy clouds that hung low in the sky and imitated the cows and sheep grazing in the fields below. The mountain sides were stained white where runoff from prior rain storms had flowed, cutting into the earth.
We passed people out hiking or biking on trails or kayaking on the clear, blue waters. Plus there are ski fields in the surrounding mountains, all of which were only an hours drive from Christchurch. What an amazing resource for outdoor enthusiasts who live in Christchurch.
As the scenery rolled past and as I shot picture after picture (you would have been proud, Sue), we drew up to the station at the village of Arthur’s Pass. The village is nestled in one of the U shaped valleys and was originally established by railroad workers who were building a tunnel through the pass. The entire tour group got off at this stop to catch a bus to see the nearby glaciers and the woman from Darwin got off for a day of hiking. In fact, most of the passengers got off at Arthur’s Pass rather than to continue on to Greymouth.
I seriously spent several minutes debating about just getting off of the train to spend the night in the village. I had thought about it when I was planning the trip as well, but had opted to spend the day in Nelson instead. I would later regret not getting off of the train, but to do so would have meant eating what I had paid for the bus ticket from Greymouth to Nelson and canceling my reservation at a hostel that night. My later regrets about not spending the night in Arthur’s Pass were only offset by the really neat people who I would meet in the next 24 hours and who I would not have met otherwise. If not for the people, I would probably still be upset about my choice.
Once the train left the Arthur’s Pass station, it plunged into a 8,529 meter long tunnel which was the longest in the British Empire at the time of its construction in 1923. The tunnel completed the Christchurch to Greymouth rail link and was originally designed for electric locomotives. The tunnel steadily increases in grade and trains making the return trip must use two locomotives, one serving to the brake the train.
It took about 15 minutes to travel through the tunnel during which time the observation car was closed. Soon after we cleared the tunnel we found ourselves once again in hills, but ones that were not quite as dramatic as before and with more tree cover. The vegetation would become more tropical, reflecting the 5 meters (16.5 feet!) of annual rainfall the west coast of the South Island receives each year. Since we had passed to the other side of the mountain ridge, we were now following the route of the Grey River as it made its way towards the west coast of the island and the Tasman Sea. There were more signs of settlement as we passed some houses and the occasional dam. We also passed a lot of sheep and cattle and even an occasional emu ranch.
The original impetuous to build the rail line through the mountains was to be able to get the gold discovered during the gold rush of the 19th century into Christchurch. I don’t know if the source of the gold has been exhausted, but there is still coal mining in the area.
The train ride took a total of four and a half hours and we pulled into the Greymouth train station at 12:30. The train would then be making the return trip to Christchurch. A roundtrip ticket was only a little more expensive than a one way ticket, but even though the trip was spectacular, I don’t think I would have wanted to have made the trip back. However, one could also get off in Arthur’s Pass and then catch the return train to Christchurch later in the day, allowing for several hours of hiking in the mountains and which would have been a good option for a day trip from Christchurch.
The bus station in Greymouth is conveniently located in the same building as the train station and so I only had to get off the train, collect my bag from the luggage car and wait. The town of Greymouth has been described by the Rough Guide as one of the most dispiriting towns on the west coast and so I left without regretting having a chance to look about. The Intercity bus was large, comfortable and easily one of the nicest bus rides that I have ever taken. As there were only a few passengers, I could spread out and enjoy the scenery as we passed. The road took us on a ridge along the coast, affording beautiful views of the beaches below and the coastline beyond. I am very happy that I took the bus because the scenery was beautiful.
When I had looked at the bus schedule, I had wondered why the bus trip would take seven hours. I soon found out when after only 45 minutes of travel, the bus driver announced a rest stop that would last for 45 minutes at a roadside café and shop. The bus driver urged us to walk across the road to the Paparoa Nation Park which is home to the Pancake Rocks and blowholes. The rocks are accessed by walking along a trail though a short woods to the edge of cliffs that descend rapidly to the sea. According to the Rough Guide, the limestone rocks at the waters edge have been weathered to resemble an immense stack of giant pancakes created by stylobedding, a chemical process in which the pressure of overlying sediments creates alternating durable and weaker bands. The stacks of rocks, just crying for some syrup are undermined by huge caverns where incoming waves may send spumes of water sprouting up through blowholes.
The bus driver had put the fear of God into all of the passengers by warning that we only had a few minutes to see the site and told tales of passengers left behind who had been eaten alive by the Westland black petrels which breed in the area and are cousins of the albatross. (I made that last part up to see if you were awake). So a group of us from the bus quickly made our way over to the track and walked out to the rocks. I wound up walking next to Kelly, a woman from the UK and we started chatting as we made our way out to the rocks. The rocks were really neat, but we did not see anything resembling a blowhole. We asked one of the rangers working on the trails and he explained that you had to have high swells in order for the blowholes to work. Unfortunately, we were at low tide at the time which made matters worse and so we had to settle for the pancakes which were novel enough to please.
Kelly and I had been speaking about places that we had been in NZ and beyond and once we reboarded the bus, we moved to sit next to each other to continue our chat. Kelly is currently on a one year trip around the world. She had just come from Australia where she had spent several months and several months in south-east Asia before that. She would spend a good number of weeks in New Zealand before continuing on to the Pacific islands such as Fiji and Tahiti. I asked her how she was able to do this and she told me a bit about her story.
In the UK she had been working for twelve years at a big insurance company, staring in human resources. Later she had moved into web development because although the companies technical people made great web sites, they lacked the people skills to make them user friendly or to convey the message that they company wanted on the sites. Her career was going well and she had a house, a car and all of that. Then one day, she looked at her life and the routine of going to work from 9 till 5, returning home tired and only having a little time in the evening for herself. She realized that this was the rest of her life and that perhaps there was more. She decided to sell her house, her car and her belongings and to take off and travel around the world for a year while she was still young enough to be able to backpack and to enjoy it.
There are guidelines for this sort of thing and the rule of thumb for one year of travel is that you only choose two continents to concentrate on. She chose Asia and Australasia and her travel was dictated by her plane ticket which required her to always move counterclockwise around the world. She could go from Australia to New Zealand, but not back. Her final stop would be in California on her way back to the UK. However, it sounds like she will never be truly be able to go back to the normal work day again because she was very interested in the WorldTeach program or other opportunities to volunteer abroad after her travels were over. Once one gets a taste of the freedom of making decisions such as, “I think that I will go to Laos today”, the thought of a daily job with two weeks of holiday is horrifically constraining.
Speaking of Laos, the vegetation that we passed by as we skirted the coast was included palms and other tropical looking vegetation. It struck me as looking like what I would picture SE Asia to be like and Kelly confirmed that it reminded her of Laos. The abundance of dark green vegetation that climbed the surrounding hillsides is what drew the comparison.
To my disappointment since our conversation was really interesting, Kelly got off the bus in the city of Westport to sample the jet boating. Kelly had spent a night in Greymouth as well and she had said that the town was as boring as the guidebook said. She had gone to the information office in Greymouth (every little town in New Zealand has a staffed information office, full of brochures and the staff can help to book accommodations or outings), but when she had asked about things to do that might keep her in Greymouth for another night they staff had not been able offer anything and so she left. I doubt she found much better in Westport which the guidebook describes as running Greymouth close for the dubious honor of being the most dispiriting town.
After Westport, our bus left the coast and began to climb through the surrounding hills. The road made for some adventurous driving. There were times when the road narrowed to a single lane in order to make its way around a cliff with the river below us and rock extending above. There were mirrors on the side of the cliff so that drivers from each direction could see if there was a car currently making its way around the bend. There must be some rule about who has the right of way.
We passed through wooded areas that showed signs of logging. It turns out that the entire area is the largest man-made forest in the world, specifically made for the logging industry. I saw a lot of pine trees that only had branches at the very top. It was later explained to me that the lower branches were all cut away so that the trees grew straight. I also learned that the pine tree is not indigenous to New Zealand, but was brought by the European settlers.
We passed by a section of river which was used for one of the river scenes in the Lord of the Rings (bus driver commentary). The LOTR filming sites are scattered throughout NZ and it would take a persevering and wealthy person to visit them all. For example, I later met a man who had signed up with a tour of Hobbiton. He said that most of the set had been disassembled but that one could still make out Bilbo’s door and the party tree. Small concession for the $50 he paid for the privilege.
Our bus made another long stop for dinner and it was close to 20:00 that we finally arrived in the town of Nelson.
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