There’s a traffic jam on the road to Paradise, a three-car lock-up along this pitted gravel track about five miles north of the hamlet of Glenorchy, at the western end of Lake Wakatipu—how remote is this!—the longest lake in all of New Zealand, South Island or North.
Here where the ozone layer has thinned out to nearly nothing, the sun is glowing brilliantly and the sky is a lovely translucent off-blue, and I’m sitting in my rental car with the windows rolled down, enjoying an antipodean 70-degree January afternoon. Two other cars (three cars constituting a traffic jam in this near-wilderness area of a sparsely populated twin-island nation in the South Pacific) have stopped just ahead of me, their drivers considering the wisdom, as I will be in a moment, of driving down into and across a six-foot-wide culvert filled with rushing water and rocks.
The first car begins rolling slowly forward, dips down into the culvert, bobs along like a cork on the ocean, and makes its way up the other side. The second car suddenly follows. I glance around at the inquisitive cows that have wandered close to the road to observe us, and then drive forward myself, saying a prayer for the rental company’s axles and then bouncing down and up, gazing out at the dust cloud stirred by the first two cars as I catch sight of my goal, a line of beech trees about a half mile ahead, silvery green against the backdrop of azure lake and snowcapped mountain peaks.
“What am I doing here?” I ask myself as a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles with the logo “Nomad Safaris” on their doors comes barreling along from the opposite direction, taking the culvert with the ease of kids playing hopscotch.
Blame it on the movies. As one Hollywood reporter recently wrote, if there were an Academy Award for Best Location, New Zealand would win hands down. Here at the edge of Mount Aspiring National Park, on the border of a private estate named after the mythical part of the heavens from which John Milton has the angel Lucifer fall, director Peter Jackson filmed the dreamy Lothlórien episodes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The drivers and passengers in those other four-wheel-drive vehicles have probably read about this, too. So all of us out here, we’re rubbernecking at a place that exists only in a movie.
I’m not surprised. In a miraculous feat of publicity, the Lord of the Rings trilogy by itself has made the landscape of this small island nation 1,500 miles southeast of Australia as recognizable to film fans as the buttes and bluffs and canyons of the American West. As Peter Jackson, a native New Zealander himself, has said, “Even though we are right down here at the bottom of the world, we have mountains, forests, and fields, rivers, lakes, and waterfalls that have a slightly familiar yet slightly fantastical appearance.” Perfect for the movies.
But it goes even deeper than that. While it was in fact The Lord of the Rings that led me on this mini-quest up the Paradise road, I had many other New Zealand movie images in my mind as I sat awake during the 13-hour night flight over the Pacific from Los Angeles to Auckland—among them, the dark beach with the furious surf in Jane Campion’s lyrical 1993 The Piano; the triumphant young Maori girl astride the ocean mammal in Whale Rider; the beautiful snow-draped volcanic peak, the North Island’s Mount Taranaki, that served as a stand-in for Mount Fuji in The Last Samurai; the graceful and revenge-crazed blue-tattooed Maori warriors in Utu.
And the memory of some books, too, to be fair, particularly English novelist Rose Tremain’s recent novel The Colour, about New Zealand’s 19th-century South Island gold rush, and local novelist Maurice Shadbolt’s historical trilogy, beginning with the wonderful Season of the Jew (about the wars between the Maoris, who discovered this out-of-the-way land about 1,000 years ago, and the British, who arrived in great numbers in the early 19th century), and the technically astute stories of Katherine Mansfield, the world-famous literary figure born and raised in Wellington, the nation’s capital.
So I had daydreamed awhile about visiting these shores that movies and books had made seem so attractive. What a shock upon arriving here to find a country, as Peter Jackson has suggested, both so familiar and yet so strange. Imagine what it must be like for a foreign visitor to America, who has watched our westerns and action movies for many years, to arrive in New York or Los Angeles. So close to the dream, so far from the real. It is nothing less than deceptively easeful—and completely disarming.
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