Cut next to our flight south to the city of Wellington, the country’s second largest, at the very bottom of the North Island, and zoom in on the glimpse we catch of Mount Taranaki, beneath whose snow-painted summit Tom Cruise played a 19th-century American mercenary in The Last Samurai and nearly lost a limb—for real—in one of the battle scenes.
Cut to Wellington itself, New Zealand’s charming capital—think of it as the Trieste of Oceania—where houses run up hillsides overlooking its sheltering harbor, while around Sinclair Head surge the unpredictable currents of the broad Cook Strait, separating North Island from South. After a few days of museums and shops and wonderful food and wine—and a taxi ride outside of town, during which we caught a glimpse through a chain-link fence of the quarry where Peter Jackson and his movie crew built the mythical fortress of Helm’s Deep—we took the three-hour ferry ride across the strait to Picton. (Imagine this: A country the length of California divided in two by eight miles of water!) After lunch at a harborside café, we drove across the top of the South Island, stopping for the night at a lovely lodge where fly fishermen eat like kings after spending the day casting in the Maruia River, and then moving rather slowly around the attractive curves of the Buller River valley to the rugged west coast.
Montage of ten-mile beaches and vast cliffs, broad river bottoms with thick bands of water rushing toward the Tasman Sea, the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers inching slowly toward that same destination; remnants of the separation, hundreds of millions of years ago, of this territory from the even older supercontinent of Gondwanaland, these gargantuan vistas make Big Sur look like Little Sur. A walk to the face of one of the glaciers in a steady, soaking rain, and we bathe in blue light emanating from the interior of the ice. Our drive from the west coast through the Southern Alps to the central plain of Otago was even more dramatic, the surrounding mountains and waterfalls so spectacular that I was often tempted to look rather than steer, a potentially deadly mistake in this part of the island.
Such beauty heaped on beauty! This small country can overwhelm you with its vistas, as if the gods of tectonic plates had said, after wrenching the islands away from Gondwanaland, “We have sent you to a lonely part of the globe, surrounded by water and far from almost everything, so we will give you more sublime sights at home than any other country on the planet.” After a starlit overnight stay on board a 100-foot power-and-sail vessel on the ancient fjord of Milford Sound—and after that bumpy ride toward Paradise—my wife and I needed to take a breather. So we settled in for a couple of days at a splendid lodge just east of the resort town of Queenstown, where a great deal of the filming of The Lord of the Rings took place. But we couldn’t sit still. On a pleasant sun-filled afternoon we drove a few miles up into the foothills of the Crown Range to the old gold-mining camp of Arrowtown, where thousands of desperate men once panned for sparkling ore in the Arrow River. Park your car just off the main street, and take a three-minute stroll down to the rushing stream that held so many hopes and destroyed so many illusions.
There’s more movie gold there, too, if you want to look for it. Head upriver about 50 yards, as Ian Brodie suggests in The Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook, and you can wade in the prototype of the mythical Ford of Bruinen, where dark horses and dark-cloaked riders paused and reared, and then roared across the river, in search of a powerful ring. By then we were so caught up in the dreamy film we were making with our real lives—two American travelers, fleeing winter in the Northern Hemisphere, find themselves at large in a geologically phantasmal nation down near what one writer has called “the last curve of the globe”—that we chose the other direction, walking downstream, on the path beneath the sheltering beeches, beside the slow-rushing, jade-tinted waters of the Arrow, at home with ourselves and yet happy to be meandering along in another world. No matter how far we tramped or drove or sailed we would never reach Paradise, we knew, but here, there, everywhere in this marvelous country, we had at least caught a glimpse of it.
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