Wellington Movie Tours: The Final Installment of our LOTR Tours!

Yes, our third and final Lord of the Rings tour took us out to the outskirts of the city and up on Mount Victoria. Our tour guide, Ted first showed us a plateau to overlook the city that also was the location of two scenes from the movies. The great thing about Ted's tour was he carried a laptop around with him (even in the rain that day) and showed us clips of the film so you could look at the scene, then look at the scenery and actually see it, instead of just pretending I could remember the scene they're talking about, it was right there in front of me!

So we saw a lot of scenes filmed on Mount Victoria from the first film used as the outer woods of Hobbiton: where the four hobbits tumble down and land in a heap on the road from the "Shortcut to Mushrooms" scene, the path where Frodo shouts "Get off the road!" (see picture above but have to imagine the hitchcock effect) and the scene where they all hide under a tree root from the black rider (did our own version - minus the tree which wasn't there)! We also did our own photo version of the tumbling hobbits with the provided handy props (including a well crafted broken carrot)! and directed by Ted. Such fun!

We also had time to see the boat used in King Kong where they had painted rust on to it, and now all that's left is the rusty-looking boat. We were told about up coming film projects and even had time to skulk outside the Weta Studios and take stalker-type pictures of the figurines (a mighty lifesize one of the orc Lurtz) they had up in the windows...including one from the film "Labyrinth"! Me and Jen saw it and squealed..."Labyrinth!", the two younger girls on the tour had no clue what the 80's film was! It was a sad, sad moment!