Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

As I wrote in a recent blog, we had plans to hike four waterfall trails on our day-trip to Tongariro National Park in New Zealand a few weeks ago. After we took a rain delay on hiking the first falls and then found a bonus falls instead we moved on to the second falls on our original list, Mangawhero Falls.

If nothing else the trail to Mangwhero Falls was short, maybe 5 minutes of hiking each way. Thus we didn't mind hiking it in the drizzling rain. (Again, it's a two hour hike that's no fun in the rain.)



Mangawhero Falls is dubbed "Gollum's Pool" for its use as a location scene in the Lord of the Rings movies. Apparently this was the grotto used in the scene where Gollum has a soliloquy with a dead fish. I say apparently for two reasons. First, because there is another falls in Tongariro National Park that also claims to be "Gollum's Pool". Second, because this canyon would be extremely difficult for a film crew to get into. There's no trail down from the rim. Equipment, crew, and actors would have to be lowered in from above, whcih is dangerous in a narrow canyon like this.



Well, Gollum soliloquy or no, it's a pretty falls.

In fact it's much nicer without Gollum around.

New Zealand Travelog #29
Whakapapa, NZ - Tue, 16 Apr 2024, 4pm

Today we've visited Tongariro National Park in New Zealand. I'm writing a summary of the day right now rather than a trail-by-trail blog because with us having managed 3 hikes plus numerous hop-out-and-take-pictures stops today the latter would span at least 5 journals with photos and would take a few days to publish.

We visited two areas Tongariro. For lack of better obvious names I'll call them the Turoa area and the Whakapapa area. First along the road to Turoa we:

• Started from The Hobbit Motor Lodge in Ohakune
• Got to the trailhead for Waitonga Falls but it was already cloudy and started raining and decided not to do this 4km hike... yet.
• Saw a falls from the roadside we initially thought was Waitonga Falls but wasn't.
• Drove to the top of the road at Turoa, where we got above one layer of clouds and caught a few glimpses through the upper cloud layer of 2,797 m (9,177 ft) tall Mount Ruapehu, an active volcano and the tallest mountain on New Zealand's North Island. We also saw a bonus waterfalls near road's end.
• Came back down the road into the cloud layer and hiked Mangawhero Falls (Golem’s pool).
• Thought again about hiking Waitonga Falls but when the rain intensified as we reached the trailhead decided instead to try our luck elsewhere.

We then drove back down through Ohakune and looped around the west side of the park to reenter via the Whakapapa road. Then we:

• Happily caught clear weather on western flank of the mountain. We could see clouds were still hanging heavily over its southern flank.
• Hiked Taranaki Falls.
• Drove all the way up to road's end at Whakapapa, catching several glimpses of the mountain's triple peak and seeing a bonus waterfalls along the way.
• Came back down the road and hiked Tawhai Falls— which is also called Gollum's Pool. I swear, if they try to stick Gollum's name on one more thing in this park they should just rename the damn park to Nasty Hobbitses, We Hates Them National Park.

Yes, it's been a busy day! More blogs with photos will come once I'm caught up with the rest of the trip.

Update: And after all this we still had time for a soak in a natural spring hot tub at our hotel before dinner!

Update 2: added links to other journal entries as I posted them.

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.

In Game of Thrones S8E3, "The Long Night", we see the battle for the world. The surviving members of most of the northern houses, allied with Queen Daenerys and her Dothraki horde and Unsullied troops, assemble at Winterfell to meet the onslaught of the Night King's army of the dead, possibly 1,00,000 strong.



Seeing how season 7 ended with two major battles to resolve— the battle against the dead, and the battle against Cersei for control of Westeros— I knew that series 8, with just 6 episodes, would have to move quickly to finish the series. Thus I wasn't surprised that this climactic battle arrived in just the 3rd episode.

On the whole I really liked this episode. It's the longest of the series with a run time of 82 minutes, and it's pretty much all battle. That's long. Even epic movie battles are half that. For example, the Battle at Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the longest set-piece battle in movie history, clocked in at just 40 minutes. The showrunners of Game of Thrones keep it from dragging by focusing on the the experiences of a limited number of characters such as Jon Snow, Arya Stark, and Bran Stark. We see threads of the story more or less through their eyes. While there are a lot of other first-person characters in the episode (Danerys, Tyrion, Sansa, Brienne, Jaime, Sam, Sandor, et. al.) they have short viewpoint scenes. We mostly see them as they intersect with the episode's main through-lines.

While this episode had the highest viewership ratings of the series and also the HBO network as a whole when it aired in 2019, with nearly 18 million overnight viewers, it also attracted a lot of fan criticism. It seems fans were unhappy primarily with two things. One was a technical matter: the visuals are very dark, making it hard to see what's happening in action sequences.



The fans are right... though I'll note that this was not a new problem with this particular episode. It's been a problem across many episodes of Game of Thrones that critical scenes are under-lit, rendering the visuals murky and confusing as to what's happening. As a note, I've adjusted the levels and contrast in the pictures above to make them more vivid. (Do you see how the Night King's eyes really "pop"? Simple Photoshop trick.)

In other productions, particularly in movies, filmmakers use extra lighting in low-light scenes so the visuals show better. There's a story— and perhaps it's apocryphal— that one of the lead actors in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers challenged a director on where all the light at the Battle of Helm's Deep (mentioned above) was supposed to be coming from, as the battle took place in the dark and rain. The director shot back, "The light comes from the same place as the theme music."

The second major fan frustration involves who defeats the Night King. This is a major episode spoiler; find it after the cut.

( How the battle is won— and why I liked it )