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.
My immediate goal upon arriving in Auckland was to find the beach in The Piano, which, as the crow flies, is only about 30 miles west of the city, on the shore of the Tasman Sea. But as I drove myself and my wife west out of the country’s largest city in a heavy early-morning storm—summer rain in our part of the world is never like this, so hard and so constant—crossing bridges and viaducts to pass over the water that makes up so much of Auckland’s domain, the weather proved too difficult and our map too vague, so we decided to turn north toward our destination for the night and save the beach for later in our stay.
By midmorning the skies had begun to clear, and we had clean views of the landscape: sheep-speckled squares of farmland, with the blue of the Tasman hinting to us from the west and the South Pacific beckoning to us from the east. In New Zealand, despite all the acreage of field and hill and forest that makes up the North Island, and all the mountains and great lakes and pastureland and vineyards of the South Island, water is never far away, falling from the sky, gushing from the rock face, gathering in lakes, and always, always surrounding you no matter where you are, at home or out on the road. Stand anywhere in this buoyant country, and it is like standing on the deck of a nation-size oceangoing vessel moving through time and great seas.
That’s what New Zealand’s earliest inhabitants discovered. The first Maori explorers paddled their giant oceangoing canoes—seven of them, as the story would have it, each carrying members of a different tribe or subtribe—across the Pacific to shelter here in what is now called the Bay of Islands, on the northeast coast of the North Island. They originally touched land at the bluff now known as Cape Brett, or Rakaumangamanga mai Hawaiiki (“Branch of Many Tribes”). The morning after our own arrival, my wife and I set out on a small motor-driven catamaran from the dock at the village of Russell (originally Kororareka, the first settlement in New Zealand), jaunty Kiwi skipper Pete Stuart at the helm, slapping along on the slight chop to that same spot, Cape Brett, the easternmost point of the Bay of Islands.
The Maori explorers, like Captain James Cook and his crew, and like the hundreds of English and American whalers who eventually made landfall at the Bay of Islands, had crossed thousands of miles of ocean to reach this haven. My wife and I, after our flight from L.A. and our four-hour drive north, felt we’d also accomplished a feat—one that merited celebrating. Dolphins cavorted around our small boat. A warm wind off the South Pacific toyed with our hats and hair. Our guide, a chunky Maori man—and Vietnam vet—named Richard “Blandy” Witehira, chanted a prayer to his ancestors as we started out on our hike along the ridge of one of the seven small peaks the Maoris view as representing the tribes who arrived in those original canoes.
Blandy led us in a climb of several hundred feet to the lighthouse at the top of the point, and along a series of goat paths, naming plants and trees while we walked as though he were cramming for an examination in the flora of Eden—here is the ponga, or silver fern; there is the flax plant, and notice the manuka, or tea tree; and also the ti kouka, the so-called white-flowering cabbage tree that lends a tropical look to the shorelines and hillsides and whose shoots Captain Cook’s crew nibbled on and deemed cabbagelike in taste.
Maoris. Captain Cook. Flowering hillsides. Movies may have brought us here, but we were now the actors in our own little cinema of travel, following a trail that led from one more beautiful sea-and-landscape to another.
Cut next to Karekare Beach, our original destination, where the Waitakere Hills meet the ocean, a vertiginous drive down winding roads to the place where the imported piano of the movie of the same name sat unattended on a vast strand of black volcanic sand, washed by the incoming tide and guarded at either end by two monstrous chunks of three-story-high rock. Oh, movies, oh, illusion! Where were Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel, she the mute Scotswoman, he the exotic native loner, the ill-fated lovers in that marvelous Down Under romance? Where we walked in the sea-wracked remains of a recent high tide, marveling at the outsize nature of this fantastically beautiful location, young parents pushed baby carriages across the sand, and weekenders from Auckland, many shirtless despite the constant wind off the ocean, chugged beer and played American rock and roll on their boom boxes while Japanese tourists shot at each other with fancy cameras against the rough spray and bass notes of the surf.
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.
PQs:
stand anywhere in this buoyant country, and it is like being on the deck of a nation-size oceangoing vessel moving through time and great seas.
The Details
Staying There
New Zealand, both North Island and South, has a fairly wide range of accommodations, from hostels to sumptuous lodges. At Russell, on the Bay of Islands, I recommend Kimberley Lodge (Pitt Street; 011-64-9-403-7090; lodges.co.nz; from $349) for its comfort, its views, its hospitality, and its dining room. A short distance across the bay, in Kerikeri, is The Summer House (424 Kerikeri Road; 011-64-9-407-4294, thesummerhouse.co.nz; from $124), a sweet bed-and-breakfast set in a lovely subtropical garden. Downtown Wellington’s modern Duxton Hotel (170 Wakefield Street; 011-64-4-473-3900; duxton.com; from $181) has sweeping views of the harbor.
For the antipodean summer—December to March—you’ll need to book fairly well in advance. Especially in Fox Glacier, which is remote, with only a few accommodations and heavy tourist traffic. Try the serviceable Te Weheka Inn (011-64-3-751-0730; teweheka. co.nz; from $189), on the main road. On the trout-filled Maruia River, anglers and ordinary travelers in search of solitude can enjoy tranquillity and wonderful meals at the Maruia River Lodge (State Highway 65; 011-64-3-523-9323; maruiariverlodge.co.nz; from $659). In Queenstown, which sees a lot of tourists in winter, stay outside of town on Lake Wakatipu and marvel at the otherworldly beauty (and prices) of the elegantly rustic Blanket Bay resort (011-64-3-442-9442; blanketbay.co.nz; from $817). Or tarry on the way to Arrowtown at lovely White Shadows Country Inn (58 Hunter Road; 011-64-3-442-0871; whiteshadows.co.nz; $411), a small B&B owned by two Americans.
Eating There
Ironically, in the land of pure water and organic farming, the only bad meals we had were at “organic” restaurants. Otherwise, we ate our way from North Island to South with great pleasure. Wellington’s Logan Brown Restaurant & Bar (192 Cuba Street; 04-801-5114), co-run by U.S.-trained Alister Brown, is among the finest restaurants in the country. At Kamakura (The Strand, Russell, Bay of Islands; 09-403-7771), the chef adds Pacific Rim flair to fresh seafood. A couple of places in Arrowtown—Saffron (18 Buckingham Street; 03-442-0131) and The Postmaster’s House Restaurant (54 Buckingham Street; 03-442-0991)—are also excellent. In remote Fox Glacier, Café Neve (03-751-0110), on the main road, makes delicious sandwiches and main dishes.
Being There
Outdoors enthusiasts will find that New Zealand is always a game or sport ahead of them, with saltwater and lake activities everywhere. Walkers will discover a paradise of great trails, both along the ocean, as at Cape Brett, on the Bay of Islands (09-403-8823; capebrettwalks.co.nz); on the Abel Tasman Track; on the Queen Charlotte Track, along sublime Marlborough Sounds at the northern tip of the South Island; and through forest and over steep inclines on the world-famousMilford Track, beginning at Lake Te Anau and ending at Milford Sound. The New Zealand Department of Conservation (doc.govt.nz/explore) will help you arrange multiple-day hikes, or tramps, as they’re called in New Zealand, and Real Journeys (realjourneys.co.nz), a South Island tour company, will assist with boat cruises.
If you’d rather fly than tramp or drive, it’s only an hour by jet from Auckland, the country’s largest city, to Wellington. There, you can stroll the gentle incline up Cuba Street, with its ethnic lunch places and impressive bookstores and health foods outlets, and return to the harbor area to visit the national museum, Te Papa (Cable Street; 04-381-7000; tepapa.govt.nz), and see, among other treasures, a carved Maori meetinghouse that looks like Chagall’s Maori Dream and touch a jadestone the size of a cow. A three-hour ferry ride across the sometimes volatile Cook Strait gets you to the quaint little port of Picton, at the top of the South Island. Rent a car there, and you can practice your left-side-of-the-road driving while others in your party take in views of the sublime west coast and gaze up at the splendid waterfalls on the winding drive through the Southern Alps to the Otago plateau.
The Maori term for the South Island translates as “Water of Jade.” In the old 19th-century gold rush town of Hokitika (wonderfully depicted in Rose Tremain’s recent novel The Colour), today there’s more jade in the stores than gold. And the color of the sea and the lakes and rivers—you’ll see jade there, too. —A.C.