Our Middle-Earth Adventure

It's a month since Mum and I were in New Zealand, and I've finally put together an album of our highlights, see below.

We arrived in Auckland, once the capital of the country and situated in the very north of the North Island, and after a couple of nights there embarked on a journey southwards in our rental car.

We would book a hotel, hostel or camping hut thing the night before using the wifi wherever we were staying that night, and rarely stayed in one place for longer than one night. Every day was filled with Lord of the Rings/Hobbit location hunting, sightseeing, and driving. Mum was very brave and drove us over mountains, on dirt roads, along canyons, through forests, and across a lot of narrow scary bridges. She wasn't quite brave enough to let me drive much though :P

I bought a SIM card with 3GB of data at Auckland airport and, boy, was that useful. We had absolutely no trouble finding our way around, and with the help of my guidebook and various websites combined with Google Maps I navigated us from site to site. I wasn't shy about using the data and I ran out bare hours before we left, 3 weeks after arriving.

Thanks to Matthew for lending me his sweet camera, I hope you enjoy the photos!



Bonus video: I recorded little selfies every day so I could make this silly compilation!

Visiting Middle-Earth

I'm busily planning a New Zealand holiday, with one particular aim being to visit a friend who's been there for over a year now doing her PhD, but while I'm there I thought it would be a shame not to see some Lord of the Rings/Hobbit filming locations!

So I've just finished plotting as many points as I could find to help me plan the itinerary. We're tentatively planning to fly to Auckland, hire a car and drive ourselves down to Dunedin where my friend is living, stopping at locations as we go. However, I'm waiting to hear about my application to the JET programme and can't book flights yet because the timing will coincide with possibly having to do some sort of complicated and possibly time-consuming medical examinations for the JET people - the frustrating thing being that they won't give any useful information about the requirements in advance, only that you should 'be available in April'.

Anyway, here's the map I've generated for LotR locations in New Zealand (click the icon in the top right corner to embiggen):