The World As I See It: Edoras

A few weeks ago, my friend Gerke approached me with the idea of renting a 4x4 and driving out to the Alps to the location of Edoras from the Lord of the Rings movies. Edoras is the fortress of the Horsemen of Rohan that can be seen in the Twin Towers. In the film, the Golden Hall is perched on a hill with stables and houses extending down the hill to a fortified wall which rings the hill. The film crew actually did build the Golden Hall and the nearby stables, but the rest of the buildings were added later by computer. The Golden Hall was used as a mess hall by the film crew during filming. The hill is located on public land and the film crew had to agree to remove all traces of the buildings after filming was concluded.

We rented a Rav 4 which was smaller than Gerke had expected and a little tight since we were five people. We were Darragh from South Africa and Gerke, Steff and Judy from Germany. Judy was a late addition and she almost lost her space in the car when she asked if Edoras was where the Hobbits lived. There was much grumbling, but we decided that we needed the fifth person to make the car rental economical.

It took us about two hours of driving to reach Edoras from Christchurch, including a long stretch on dirt roads (hence the 4x4). Even if it had not been the location of Edoras, the valley where we found ourselves was absolutely spectacular. To the west lay the snow covered Alps. A westerly was blowing that day, causing it to rain on the west coast of the island. Although we could see it pouring buckets on the Alps, the mountains were breaking up the clouds, preventing the rain from reaching us. Mountains also ringed the valley where Edoras is located and a river runs nearby. When we arrived, it was quite cloudy, but by lunchtime, the sky had cleared and everything was beautiful.

Just seeing Edoras was not enough, we needed to tramp over to climb it. During our walk, we ran into another group returning to their car, but otherwise we saw very few people. Our route required us to cross several streams, all flowing with glacial fed water which was freezing. Fortunately, the water only came up to our knees and so other than loosing feeling in our feet, the crossings were easy.

The ascent up Edoras was quite steep and the wind was tearing through the valley by the time we reached the top. There is one scene in the Lord of the Rings where a flag is torn from its mount on Edoras and is blown away. Standing on the hill with the wind blowing through, it was very easy to picture that scene.

We returned by another route that was not as steep a climb, but unfortunately which required far more time in the rivers. We had lunch by our car and then set out to find where the long shots of Helm’s Deep were shot. We figured out where Helm’s Deep was located, but we would have needed to tram about 10 km to get to it and we just did not have the time since we had to get the car back that night.

During lunch, we wondered if we would be spoiled by living in such an absolutely gorgeous place. Would the rest of the world look boring after we left New Zealand? Did Kiwis become numb to the beauty around them after a while?

We got our car back in good time and even ran it through a car wash to remove the evidence that we had taken it off the paved road (doing so was forbidden, but what then is the point of renting a 4x4?).

The past few weeks have been busy with my studies, moving to a new flat (my old lease was up) and spending time with friends. I am now living in a rented room in a house near uni. It is a really nice house and I pay half the rent that I paid in the student housing, but I miss the social aspect of the student housing which is a bit of a surprise. However, last Friday, I hosted Thanksgiving in one of the flats in the housing where I used to live. Everyone was excited about it because of course, they had seen Thanksgiving dinners on shows such as Friends, Gilmore Girls or the Simpsons, but they had never actually been to one. I was able to find a turkey and cranberries and I made stuffing as well. Everyone else supplied the rest of the feast. It was a lot of fun and we had people from every continent but South America and Antarctica, although one of the people in attendance is about to go to Antarctica for her summer course work (pretty cool sounding class).

I am heading off to an international conference next week which happens to be in Hawaii. The funny thing is that I leave on Saturday 2 December and I arrive in Honolulu on Friday 1 December. Air New Zealand uses some pretty fast jets.

Edoras as it appeared in the film.