Christchurch – Screaming out of Aoraki yesterday morning with a wet sky behind us and the buzz of the helicopter flight still on our mind lead to a quick chat about the quest for the Perfect Life, which, if it can be found anywhere, can probably be found here; we were thinking of the helicopter pilot, who shuttles fat tourists up and down a glacier five times a day and yet claims never to tire of it. Why? Because he loves flying helicopters. And every time he goes up there, he gets to see dorks like us completely freak out about the glacial cap and the mountains and all the other things he’s seen a million times; he sees them with fresh eyes five times a day. The perfect life, then, is simple if you can hack it: find a thing you love doing. And find a way to do it for the rest of your life.
It will come as no surprise that this place is apparently curative – I kicked an annoying little cold out of my respiratory tract in something like sixty hours, end to end – but it is endlessly surprising to me that for whatever degree the epic-awe-inspiringness of New Zealand has been caught on film in The Lord of the Rings and elsewhere, I would still say that (in those specific locations) the films manage to put, at best, 60% of the total onscreen. Arriving at Mt. Sunday after a long and bumpy ride down an unpaved road, giving way to the first view of the long blue valley ringed by snow-capped mountains and with that strange divet right in the middle of it – Mt. Sunday itself, Edoras in The Two Towers – we weren’t struck by how much it was like being in Middle Earth; we were struck by how successfully Andrew Lesnie uglied the place up to serve as the home of the Horse Lords. There are colours and shades happening in that valley that I have never seen before and will never be able to reproduce – a poisonous river running past the eastern face of the rock (which became my favourite vantage point) contained versions of green and turquoise that I’ve never laid eyes on and possibly never will again.
Mt. Sunday also afforded something else – solitude. It was the first stop on our long tour where we were not thronged by sun-baked backpackers, tour buses full of senior citizens, or inexplicable congregations of Japanese tourists. We were – the three of us – alone on that thing for a solid half an hour before another two hikers showed up. For that time, we might well have been the only humans in the whole valley; us, and the sun, and the sound of the streams far below.
Terminology notes:
“Marjorie” – the GPS voice here in New Zealand, who joins Linda (U.S.A.) and Wendy (Canada) on the list of people I shout at endlessly.
“Orcs” – other tourists, seen at a distance, approaching wherever we are.
“Chris” – our rental car.
Lord of the Rings location check:
Pelennor Fields
Gondor – The White Mountains
Caradhras
The Plains of Rohan
Edoras
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