Waterfalls near Wellington

New Zealand Travelog #26
Lower Hutt, NZ - Mon, 15 Apr 2024, 4pm

Well, that didn't take long. After arriving at Wellington Airport aboard an Airbus, not a a giant eagle, we picked up our rental car and started our 300 km drive north to Ohakune. Just 20 km into the drive we stopped to hike to a waterfall. The waterfall, in this case, is at Percy Scenic Preserve in Lower Hutt, just across the bay from downtown Wellington.



A hike of about 30 minutes led us uphill from more popular parts of the park into an increasingly narrow canyon. At the back end of it, where steep walls closed in all around, was this little waterfall. Well, not "little" in the sense of being a meter tall; it's at least 7 meters tall. But it's also not hundreds of meters tall like falls we saw at Fiordlands National Park (on a ferry tour I have yet to blog fully about).

As for Wellington itself? In an early draft of our plans we were going to spend 2 nights here. But then advice I got from NZers in a FlyerTalk forum was "skip Wellington"— from specifically a Wellington local, among others. We shortened our stay first to one night then to only this one short hike in the final version of our itinerary. My impression of Wellington from simply passing through it is: It looks San Francisco with 1/10th the population. ...No, not like SF with 90% of the population "blipped" out, but like a much smaller city built around geography similar to SF's.

From Wellington to Ohakune

New Zealand Travelog #27
Ohakune, NZ - Mon, 15 Apr 2024, 10pm

After our short hike at Percy Falls outside of Wellington we continued north to the small town of Ohakune, NZ for the night. Overall it was 308 km from the airport. The drive got wearisome after a while. Driving on the North Island is different from the South Island. Different, but not exactly better.

One difference in driving on the North Island is that I drove my first actual four-lane highway in New Zealand! The state roads are all country two-lanes in South Island. Here SR 1 was a four-lane divided highway, with entrance/exit ramps and all, for the first 40 km or so headed north from Wellington. Once the freeway petered out into a country two-lane, though, it became frustrating. The speed limit is reduced every time there's a town. That's understandable. But here there are more towns, so more slowdowns. And unlike the South Island, where seeing a small town was a) interesting because it was the first civilization for 30km around and b) charming in its quaintness— "Like 1950s America but with modern conveniences of cell phone reception and civil rights"— the North Island's small towns are just brief stretches of 1950s garish honky-tonk.

Ohakune is one of those small towns, though thankfully it's not that garish. Though maybe that's because we arrived well after dark, when more than half the restaurants were closed— because it was already the late hour of 7pm. The rest closed at 8pm, including the town's one grocery store. We missed it by 10 minutes. We were hoping to stock up on breakfast and a trail lunch for tomorrow. Oops.

For tonight our address is the Hobbit Motor Lodge. Yes, that's it's name. No, there's nothing Hobbit-y or LotR-esque about it. It's just part of how a lot of people in NZ are trying to cash in on LotR tourism— as with the giant eagles at WLG airport earlier today. And the LotR naming has nothing to do with why we chose it.

So, why here? Location. It's just south of Tongariro National Park, where we're going hiking tomorrow.

The Hobbit Motor Lodge

New Zealand Travelog #28
Ohakune, NZ - Tue, 16 Apr 2024, 8am

As I mentioned in my post from last night, we stayed in the Hobbit Motor Lodge in Ohakune, NZ.



No, it has pretty much nothing to do with Hobbits or the LotR movies... except maybe that up in the national park to the north of town are not one but two waterfalls dubbed "Gollum's pool" because it/they were apparently the location scene for CGI Gollum singing about how much he hated a fish. But which waterfall was it? The fact that there are two illustrates to me the cravenness of the industry— as does cashing in on the name with such a tenuous connection. And really it should then be called The Gollum Motor Lodge. But I'm sure that wouldn't sell room. 🤣



This little hotel has zero connection to anything hobbit-y, other than its name. It's just a shit-hole little hotel, the kind I roll my eyes at for having been rooked into booking. ...And No, I didn't book it because it's named "Hobbit", I frankly booked it despite that tourist come-on because the photos looked decent. Except it's apparent from being in our actual room that the photos were... let's just say, heavily staged. It's a quaint motor lodge style hotel of the sort I remember seeing along the honky-tonk strip in my town These relics from the 1950s were torn down by 1990 as the area grew.



How quaint is it? It's still-uses-metal-keys quaint.

And I don't even know why there are 4 keys on this ring. Only one opens the door to our room. One might open the door to the building— though it wasn't locked.



Oh, but, hey! Our room has a kitchen. Yes, we knew that when we booked it, and that was kind of one of the reasons we picked it. Too bad the grocery store was closed last night by the time we got to it, so we had nothing to cook this morning.

Kitchens are actually fairly common to find offered in NZ hotels, especially in smaller towns. Most don't have a full stove like this but do have at least a small range-top.

It seems more common to find a hotel with in-room kitchens than a pool with a hot tub. This hotel was supposed to have both. The hot tub is closed for "repairs", though. I quote "repairs" because it doesn't look like it's been open since... oh, about the time the last LotR movie was released.