It’s My Birthday! (Also Mt. Ruapehu, Gollum, and the Lonely Mountain)

Thursday, January 9th was my 55th birthday. This New Zealand trip was supposed to be my 50th birthday trip. Each decade since I was 20, I have planned an extravagant trip for myself. (age 20: Cabo san Lucas, Mexico, age 30: Greece and Turkey, age 40: Egypt) My retirement application was pending leading up to my 50th birthday, so I had no income and could not plan New Zealand in January of 2020. I thought, “No problem, as soon as the retirement paperwork is settled, I’ll go.” Well. Hello COVID. Then finally New Zealand opened up, and I had money, but Red Carpet Tours was booked for two years. I got my name on a waiting list. Despite that string of obstacles, I did not give up and here we are!

Worth the wait!! 🙂

As you see from our path on the map above, we followed the lake for some time. Pedro and I were lucky enough to be seated on the lake side of the bus, so we had the best views.

On the way we stopped in a little town to use the facilities as usual, and Pedro and I scooted quickly over to a cafe to get some coffee. Most of our hotel rooms offered instant coffee, and we are coffee snobs and were craving some of the real stuff.

Our tour guide Julie had suggested in Hobbiton that we try a “Flat White,” which we had never heard of. We dutifully tried one and it was good. Something like coffee with cream, but a bit frothier, though not quite latte level of frothiness. After finishing that, we asked at the coffee counter what a person should order if they only want black coffee. That is apparently called a “Long Black,” which we also had never heard of.

If you’re curious about the prices, everything in New Zealand seemed to be inexpensive to us. The prices you see above of course are New Zealand Dollars, and the exchange rate was about 60 cents US to 1.00 NZD. So we almost halved every pricetag. Meals, Uber rides, entrance fees, clothing, gifts, and coffees were often very reasonably priced, in our opinion. So our delicious coffees were about $2.70 each, USD.

On the way to the mountain, our tour guide Julie passed photos around the bus so we could see TV screen captures from the locations we would be visiting next. The images aren’t the best because it’s just hard to grab photos that way. Pedro and I are experimenting with ways to play the movies and grab screen shots from an iPad to see if we can improve upon them, and eventually I’ll add those photos to these posts for my own reference. Here is one that looks like it’s from the scene above:

As stunning as it is, we were not here to see Mount Ruapehu, but instead a little rock wall nearby. The rock wall is to my right as I took the photo above.

This is the kind of thing I had been dying to experience for decades, and is the reason behind our trip. To me, being able to stand on the very land and see the very scenes that I know almost by heart from the movies, is just magical. I feel that powerful fan pull for many movies, which explains my glee at visiting Disneyland too. I know it’s not for everyone, but that’s ok, because this one was for me. 🙂

Mount Ruapehu could not stand by and be ignored. Her beauty beckoned us.

On our drive up, Julie had casually mentioned something like, “Oh, if you look out over there, you can see the mountain that Peter Jackson (New Zealand director and producer) used as The Lonely Mountain. It is rare to have skies so clear that you can see it from here.” And we all craned our necks as the bus wound its way up the curvy road, and spotted the perfect peak way out in the distance, all alone, an excellent stand in for Tolkien’s Lonely Mountain, that he described in The Hobbit.

After photos of the entrance to Erebor, and photos of Mt. Ruapehu, it looked like we might not be climbing back onto the bus immediately. My tall elf boots were very comfortable and I knew I could run back down the road, around the curve, and snap a photo and return to the bus before all the people got themselves organized on the bus again. So I took off running. Another nerd had the same idea, and we both ran to get a look at the Lonely Mountain without bus windows in the way.

I stopped as soon as I could get a view of the mountain (which is actually Mount Taranaki), but Gwen decided to commit to the plan, and ran as close to the view as she could get, on the edge of a gravel pull out beside the paved road. I followed.

By the time we were done and began trotting back toward the bus, we saw about half the company had decided to copy our lead. Then Julie made her way down the hill, and when she did, everyone else followed. Scotty, the bus driver, realized the inevitable, and drove the bus down the road to where everyone had migrated.

The chill finally drove us all back onto the bus and we happily made our way down from the mountain, just a short drive to what maps called “Gollum’s Pool.” In my mind, I envisioned a couple of potential pools from the movies that we might be heading to see, but the photo we were shown was of a stream instead. I can’t explain why it got named Gollum’s Pool.

In the photo above, notice the shape of that big rock directly behind Gollum. That big rock is still there. You can also spot the hump of rocks where the Hobbits are standing, in the photo below.

Red Carpet Tours guide Julie brought out props, including a rubber mask of Gollum. Many people in our group took turns re-enacting the scene. We were impressed with Joe, who stripped down to his shorts to make it as realistic as possible, then he splashed and fumbled with the fake fish as people took photos. If you want to see examples of multiple reenactments with different members of the tour group, click through the slideshow.

Pedro and I got bored and began looking around at the edge of the cliff. Julie seemed especially concerned that we not get too close. “Watching the film, you do not realize how close Andy Serkis was to a dangerous drop,” she told us.

Pedro and I got curious and wandered off down the trail, leaving the reenactors to their thing. The trail led to a view of Mangawhero Falls, on the side of Mt. Ruapehu.

We thought back to our recollections of the movie scene, and the extravagant, unrestrained acting of Andy Serkis, who played Gollum, and we realized that many set people must have been gasping in worry as the actor flung himself forward along the stream, chasing an imaginary fish.

Eventually the rest of the group made their way down the trail to where we stood, and Pedro and I went back to the river, to finally capture photos of it with no people, as you saw above.

Curiously, it was another person’s birthday that day as well. The bus sang Happy Birthday to us as we rode back to Ohakune and where Pedro and I carried our empty paper cups back to Utopia and paid for them to be refilled again.

That night we checked into our hotel in Wellington, where we would be for three nights in a row. That seemed a luxury, and an opportunity to do laundry, which Pedro and I set out for immediately, with all our dirty clothes in our backpacks. We found a laundrymat only 15 minutes’ walk away and spent the next two hours washing and drying. Pedro caught up on news and social media and I went back to blogging. When everything was clean and dry, we filled our backpacks once more and headed back to the room for a well earned night of ease.