A very slow start today. Whilst writing journals and channel hopping, Sky manage to play two different episodes of Home and Away at the same time and appears to have Moulin Rouge and Evolution on loop on the movie channel. On making it beyond the door it seems we've even had the local paper delivered. The paper, btw, reports on the front page of the sports section on the Premiership [you can't get away from it].
First stop is the local Toyota garage where there were extremely proficient in offering not a lot. The glove box is goosed and a replacement catch will be NZ$ 60 new. The boot is a panelbeaters job -- we're the second people in today [with the same problem] -- as the boot has fixed stops, we've bent the metal. I expect the rental company will sting us but at least we've a ball park figure to fight with.
Helen's dug out some information on a LOTR film location a little way up the road at a town called Mt. Somers. It's where Edoras was built -- the tiny! head town of Rohan with the Golden Hall. En route we stop at Geraldine for lunch and the cinema over the road has much more detail on the location suggesting it's way up a minor road into the boonies. Mt Somers is a holiday park with a few private houses so we go with the cinema guide. A few km up the road and the metal becomes gravel, how familiar. Sadly none of the landscape is. The road goes ever on and on (hmm, sounds familiar) with a surprising number of cars on a desolate road.
There are two towns noted on the map, way up there, so that [the traffic] must be [for] them, then. About halfway up we stumble across two recreational lakes with plenty of people and speedboats but no Edoras. Then, a few more km up the gravel the road rounds halfway up a hill and there in the valley below us is our kiddie. Long range, wobbly in the wind shots, but we take them with the mix of plain dry grass hill or snow capped mountain backdrop. We drive down, I somewhat more enthusiastically then Helen. Down in the valley we get some good shots of the hill. FInally, a LOTR film location success. We can leave NZ! 
Just up the way we pass a dead thing in the road with a Harrier Falcon trying to eat it. As we stop the bird flies off. We loiter for twenty minutes hoping it'll return, but no luck. Helen may have got a shot of it as we approached which, given how many of these birds are about, will be, amazingly, our only shot [of one].
It's the third such fence we've passed so I must mention it. Three weeks ago we drove past a farm fence with litter stuck to it over a twenty yard stretch, until you looked at it closely and it was all women's knickers. We'd gone past at speed so I dismissed it. A week later we went past another farm fence with more litter, but this time, hundreds of bras. OK, that's odd but you can dismiss it as something odd. But today it's shoes tied to a farm fence, we couldn't tell whether they were male or female [shoes]. This is [now] perverse, a lot more than odd by a long chalk.
The hill [Edoras] btw is 48km off the beaten track (SH72 to be precise). Just outside Timaru I spotted a pre-fab building manufacturer advertising "Offices and Granny Flats."
The Anchor Motel, Timaru S44.38750 E171.24127 Elev. -57m!
Copyright 2002 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.