We are falling behind
with this! Not sure how many people are actually reading it though, but we thought
we'd put up another post of the adventure we had in Edoras last week.
So we had set out one
morning to Rohan, the realm of the Horse Lords. A grey-green all-terrain beast
of a truck was our steed that bore us to Edoras, the iconic city of the Rohirrim.
Leaving our campervan
behind, we set out through rush-hour traffic heading south with a small group.
After a brief stop to pick up our lunch at a town half an hour south, we turned
west and headed for the mountains. En-route, the sunny skies that greeted us
this morning were veiled by clouds that reached out from the mountaintops.
Fortunately though, they were not low enough to hide the peaks from view.
According to our tour-guide, there have been days when the clouds have been hardly
higher than the truck we were travelling in.
To distract us from
the gloom, we were treated to video content giving us a beginner's guide to the
Lord of the Rings, the Rohirram, and Edoras. It is interesting how many people
actually attend the tours that do not know anything about the series. One girl
had only seen the third film... as Edoras is predominant in the second she
likely had no idea what was happening. Another man did not like the series at
all, though he was with his wife who was a big fan. Along the ride we also were
treated to filming bloopers, commentaries and deleted scenes, some which we had
never even seen before. So it was that we made our way further and further up
into the mountains, distracted from the video only by the tour-guide's stories
of crazy tours and his mention of our entering the technical 'border' of the
Riddermark. We would soon get our first glimpse of Edoras, otherwise known as Mount Sunday, though as
our guide mentioned earlier; it would be a rather small glimpse at first. As
the story goes though, we wouldn't even have seen a glimpse if not for the luck
of Peter Jackson's film scouts.
In the planning
stages of the Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson sent out his scouts to the four
corners of the country, trying to find a place that fit perfectly the rich
description provided by J.R.R. Tolkien in his books. To find a small rocky
outcrop alone in the middle of expansive rolling fields, with a glittering
silver stream and a border of white-capped mountains, proved to be an impossible
task. Admitting defeat, the primary location scout for Edoras booked a plane
from Queenstown to Wellington, where he would meet with Peter Jackson to
discuss a computer-generated location. With the most incredible fortune,
en-route to Wellington he was in a window seat, and just happened to be looking
out the window while crossing over Mount Sunday. He spotted the location,
quickly looked at a map to figure out where he was, and upon arrival in
Wellington promptly booked a flight back to Christchurch where he rented a car
and raced out to the location. It was so perfect that when he eventually met
with Peter Jackson, they had found their location for Edoras.
Getting down nearer
to the site, we discovered the reason for the 4WD transportation. At the end of
a dirt road, we arrived at the edge of the farmer's lands, where many other
tourists were milling about and taking far off shots of the area. We wondered
at if we were to be stuck in the same situation as them, until our guide got
out, unlocked the gate onto the farmer's land, drove us through and locked the
gate back up. We then proceeded to drive down a road/river (lots of rain, which
we learned had a history of stranding tour groups on the mountain) and almost
right up to the mountain. We crossed over the Silver Stream, the same one
Gandalf splashed through on Shadowfax in the movies, then made the arduous
climb up to the spot where the Golden Hall once stood. Nothing structural now
remains of the site, but using pictures the guide was able to lay out the
setting for us. It turns out the guide even got to see the site in its complete
form a few days prior to the movies and had high phrases for the Golden Hall
and the amount of detail that went into it. 
Wielding props from
the movies (the sword of Aragorn and a flag of Rohan), we took pictures on the top
of the mountain (which looked like more of a hill compared to the snow-capped
ones all around us). The only difficulty was the wind, which during set
construction was blowing at roughly 100km/hour. During filming it got up to
110km/hour, and it has been recorded at speeds up to 200km/hour. It was less
than all that for our tour, but still a pain to deal with. At least it kept it
from being too hot.
We then had a
champagne picnic lunch with sandwiches and other nice treats (like delicious
chocolate cake) provided by a cafe in a nearby town. We took some last shots
and then made the trek back into Christchurch.
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