Queenstown trip 2 of 4: Paradise

Another beautiful day in Otago, so we took ourselves for a drive around the lake to Glenorchy and on to Paradise and the end of the Dart Track. I always feel a slight pang of something (guilt?) when in tramping country and not tramping but at least I have a good excuse at the moment.

I wanted to visit that area as a true blue LOTR geek, so have ticked that off the list - now we need to re-watch the movies (any excuse will do) so we can spot specific places rather than them just being some generic pretty location in the South Island.

We stopped at the fire station in Glenorchy on the way through, they had the door up so Dave went in to take a look at their vehicles and chat to a fellow volunteer. They get far fewer callouts than Kaukapakapa down there but were required to be on standby that afternoon as the Wolverine film crew were in the area blowing things up.

The borders of Lorien

The Dart River

Where's Wachael?

We got held up at a couple of points en route due to the filming.
We would love to be able to report that we saw this helicopter shell being blown up (if you can't tell from the photo, it was suspended between two cranes and there was this massive stash of LPG cylinders they were presumably going to use to make a big fireball):

However everything seemed to get held up by this scene by Diamond Lake, according to a crew member a stunt driver "zigged when he should have zagged" and it took them AGES to pull the vehicle back onto the road. An expensive mistake, another day's worth of hire for those cranes would have been costly.



I can't say that Wolverine would be our usual choice of movie to watch but we might have to go just so we can point and say "we were there"...