Edora – A little Lord of the Ring Adventure
A popular thing to do in New Zealand is to visit locations that where used in the filming of the Lord of the Ring films. There’s plenty of organised tours you can go on to visit them with guide books recommending the best ones. We didn’t go for any of the Lord of the Rings tours, instead, quite randomly on the way somewhere else decided to take our little rental car off on a little adventure in search of Edora from the Lord of the Rings, known as Mt. Somers to the locals.
We turned off the main road at Mt. Somers and headed (against the rental companies wishes) along the 30km unsealed road to Edora. The drive there is fantastic, the Southern Alps looking magnificent in the crystal clear air. As you approach Edora you first get a glimps of the rocky hill from some way off and its instantly recognisable from the film, despite lacking the wooden village that was erected on the hill. Its pretty amazing to think this was the location of a film, it feels so isolated!
Once we arrived and parked up we could see the people in the distance walking on the Edora hill, we decided we wanted some of that action too. Not long after we set off in in a direct path towards Edora we came across the 2 streams, the first stream crossing was navigated with ease, a hop and a skip was all it needed to conker.
The next, however, wasn’t quite so easy. There wasn’t going to be any jumping over the next river unless you where an Olympic long jumper, we instead went for the shoes and socks off and wading technique. There was one problem, the water must have just flown off a glacier or something similar as it was SO cold! We tried a few more times before having to head back to the car, defeated!
Back to the car, a simple fence hurdle, couldn’t even do that damn it!
Below is a picture of what it looked like in the film:
Tags: New Zealand, organised tours, photo, Photos, Travel
May 20th, 2010 at 5:33 am
love your pics I when on a lotr tour in arrowtown it was great http://www.goldenfoxtours.co.nz