Blue Lakes and Movie Outakes

Blue Lakes and Movie Outakes
Lake Tekapo, New Zealand

Lake Tekapo, New Zealand

Off we set to Lake Tekapo, fearful of the steep roads that poor Blondini was going to face and much to our surprise it was as flat and straight as we had driven anywhere in NZ. We don’t make a habit of visiting random lakes, the reason that we were headed here was to give Blondini a very special photo shoot.

When we bought Blondini she had two random stickers on her back windows to hide her cosy insulation and unbeknown to us one of them was taken at Lake Tekapo and featured the famous Church of the Good Shepherd, so it true Currie style we made it our mission to get a picture of Blondini in front of this scene.

The drive to Lake Tekapo was absolutely amazing, we drove past Lake Pukaki which was as blue as I have ever seen any lake in my life and had the monstrous Mount Cook looming behind it. Thankfully we stopped to take pictures as afterwards the sun vanished and the lakes all looked just a bit less special and a lot less blue.

Lake Tekapo aside from coming through and providing us with the perfect location to get our photo of Blondini was a bit disappointing. The town which is essentially a big car park with a café or two and an isite tourist information with the most unfriendly and unhelpful staff we had met anywhere in NZ. The other downside was that it was the stopping point for the Kiwi experience bus so the town/carpark was full of 18 year old backpackers stocking up on beans and beer in the supermarket.

Our campsite in Tekapo had the most stunning views over the lake but it was like being in Beijing, the kitchen was overrun with Chinese tourists making the most hideous concoctions. Tim usually just leaves me to cook, but he just couldn’t resist coming along to get a glimpse of the kitchen madness. Thankfully our stay at Lake Tekapo was saved by the awesome and pretty much empty hot pools. just a short walk from our campsite and half price thanks to a Bookme voucher, ahhh bliss!

The next day we made our escape to the nearby town of Twizel, the location of the infamous Pelennor Fields scene in LOTR, where hundreds of horses convene for battle in the third movie. Obviously we felt completely obliged to undertake yet another LOTR tour to fully appreciate the location and set off in a mini bus loaded with costumes and weapons. The tour was as we expected awesome, we really were less interested in what the guide had to tell us and more interested in getting into her fancy dress box. One interesting fact that she did tell us was that when they were filming in Twizel, this town with a population of just 1,200 suddenly doubled overnight and to get the sheer number of orcs needed for the scene Peter Jackson put out a call to everyone in the town in the schools, campsites and anyone else passing through to come and be an orc for the day. Oh how we wish we had been there then! However we still had a lot of fun being hobbits, elves and orcs. We were both pretty sad to have to give back the Gollum mask L.

Whilst on our LOTR tour the guide gave us a sneaky bit of information that was going to change our drive the following day, we now needed to make a quick diversion to another ex-movie location. Elephant rocks was once the lair of Aslan when they were filming The Lion, the Witch & The Wardrobe, AWESOME!

Back on the road and back to the coast, next stop Moereki!