Back to Wellington

We set off from Waitomo caves slightly pessimistic, seeing as there were only a few people actually living in this town and our last experiences with hitch-hiking from there weren't exactly great. However, about 2 minutes after we started a car stopped and took us to the next city out of Waitomo where it would be much easier to catch a ride.
The driver was the owner of the restaurant in Waitomo and he mentioned that Peter jackson and Guillermo del Toro were having dinner in his restaurant in a few days to discuss their plans for the upcoming Hobbit movies. Apparently at least part of it is going to be filmed in Waitomo Caves.
He said he knew a good spot for hitch-hiking and that he'd drop us off there. Unfortunately this spot turned out to be horrible, just after a corner and on the top of a hill. It took us a bit longer than usual to find a ride here, but after about 30 minutes an Englishman picked us up and said he'd take us to Taumarunui where he was going to buy some groceries before continuing to a town called National park. he said he'd probably take about 30 minutes and that we could either wait for him there or try to continue without him. In the end we agreed that we'd try to continue but that if we were still there when he was done with his groceries that he'd pick us up. Seeing as we were at the start of the town we didn't expect to get picked up at all, but we gave it a go anyway. After about 20 minutes a car stopped for us, smiling we walked up to it, but inside wasn't what we hoped to see. The car was missing it's backseats and was filled with junk, there was a chainsaw in the back and a circular saw in the passenger seat. The driver looked unclean and he was missing half his teeth. He said something we couldn't understand so we just said that we had too much stuff with us and that we wouldn't fit in his car. At this he said that he'd ring some friends that would be able to pick us up and take us wherever we wanted to go. This had us worried and we were praying for the English guy to pick us up fast. Luckily he did, and before any of that rednecks friends dropped by as well. On the way to national park he said he knew a nice spot in the railway called Raurimu Spiral. It was supposed to be an impressive feat in railway engineering, but from the lookout we couldn't see anything; the vegetation hid the railway from sight but we'll just assume it was very impressive indeed.
He dropped us off in National park, a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. By then it was starting to get late in the afternoon and we were still quite a while away from Wanganui which was the nearest big town. It took us quite a while before we got another ride, and the burning sun wasn't exactly helping us. This time we got picked up by a farmer who was going to check up on some of his farm about 30 minutes up the road. He was a very nice guy and he let us have some carrots and potatoes from his field, but this ride left us stranded in the middle of nowhere as the sun was slowly beginning it's descent. The cars were racing past us and there wasn't a lot space for them to stop or for us to stand so we were starting to get slightly worried.
At one point a car with a black racing stripe on it came racing past us, stopped about 100m ahead of us and then came racing back to us in reverse. We were a little worried as to what kind of people we'd find inside the car, but it turned out to be 2 german girls and a german guy. Their car was absolutely packed already but we somehow managed to squeeze ourselves and our stuff in. We got to talking to them, they were quite nice, and found out that they were headed to Wellington, stopping in Wanganui for some food. We decided to ask if it was okay for us to ride all the way to Wellington with them, and they said that would be okay. As we got to thinking about it we realised that it would be very late by the time we arrived in Wellington and finding a hostel to stay in might become a problem. When we got to Wanganui they said they were worried the car might be overburdened and it was sitting very low on it's axles, so that they probably wouldn't be able to take us all the way to Wellington. jasper seemed a bit disappointed but I was sort of glad we wouldn't have to go through the hassle of finding a hostel in Wellington and I was too tired for the ride anyway.
We decided to have dinner with them and afterwards they dropped us off at our hostel.
Here I suddenly realised my phone and iPod were no longer in my pocket and they weren't anywhere in my bag either, so I figured they probably fell out of my pocket during one of our rides.
The next day we set out for Wellington and managed to get there after only 2 rides. It was a bit of a hassle to find a Hostel as a lot of them were booked full, so we decided to stay in the Base Backpackers, despite previous bad experiences, as it was the only one that had space available.
We could only book for 2 nights however, since that weekend there was to be an AC/DC concert and also a concert by Them Crooked Vultures (a band with Dave Grohl) so everything was booked full. We decided to give Josh a ring and see if we could maybe stay with him for 1 night, fortunately he said we could and that this way we'd be able to meet his parents as well.
After that was all settled we headed out into town and to the i-site to book a Lord of the Rings movie tour. Having booked that for the next day we decided to go back to our hostel and make dinner. We soon found out that the people in this Base were exactly the same as the ones in base Auckland. Loud, obnoxious, constantly drunk people who go to new Zealand for nothing else but to party. Anyways we made dinner and hung out in our room for a while before going to sleep.
The following day we headed to the i-site for our tour, while we were waiting we decided to book our boat for two days later. When we got picked up it turned out that we were the only 2 on the tour, the tour operator asked if we wanted to go the next day so that there were more people on the tour, but we'd already made plans so we declined. The first few locations were fairly boring, despite detailed information about where they shot what and a video to accompany the site so that we could recognise it ourselves. Eventually we went for lunch in the park where they shot rivendell, lunch consisted of Subway and a coke. After lunch he took us on a tour through the rivendell locations and the location where they took this: http://netanya.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/legolas_logo.jpg promotional picture.
Ofcourse we had to take our pictures at the same place, but before we could make our way up there he said he had something for us. He reached into his bag and pulled out a blonde wig, I couldn't stop laughing as he adorned my head with it. After it was on and secure I wanted to make my way up to the log, but he said he more! Out came a huge pair of rubber ears, and feeling absolutely ridiculous I posed for the picture. And well, you've probably already seen the picture on my previous post, it sort of speaks for itself.
After lunch we headed back to Wellington to pick up some more peopleand headed off to the place where they filmed the buckland forest scenes. He had some more props here for our pictures (i.e. a pipe, a pan, a broken carrot for the "I think I've broken something" scene etc.) and we had a lot of fun taking them. He even had 3 of the girls pose as a horse and black rider, hilarity ensued.
That night we didn't get a lot sleep, the guys sleeping in our room snored like there was no tomorow. We had never heard anything like it, and hopefully never will again.
We checked out after breakfast and after numerous failed attempts to contact Josh we were starting to get a bit worried. After about 3 hours we finally heard from him, turned out he had gone out drinking heavily the night before and wasn't entirely awake. He picked us up about an hour after with 3 of his friends. They had their breakfast in a kebab shop and then drove us back to Josh' place. It was so hot that day that Josh suggested we go to the river to cool off. He also mentioned they had a pretty good jump off a cliff there, about 15 meters high. We had already done a jump like that while canyoning, so we were pretty confident. When we actually got to the top of the cliff we realised this might be a bit higher, not to mention a lot more dangerous and got really nervous. But, we'd already climbed all the way up there and for some stupid reason I was the one directly behind Josh and he insisted that we go before him, which meant I had to jump first. I didn't want to go first, but there was no way I could get Josh to go first so I just kept my fingers crossed and ran off the edge. During the fall I had plenty of time to think of how high I was falling from before hitting the water with my hands flat (stupid move on my part), they were really sore afterwards so i decided one jump was enough for me.
That evening Josh and his family were going to a touchball match for Josh' dad's team. Turned out that they were short in players and me and jasper had to fill the gaps. Usually I'm at least decent at a sport, but the rules for this game were so strange that I probably didn't do very good at all, but it was a lot of fun nonetheless.
They fed us a great meal and a huge scoop of ice-cream, Josh' mom even washed some of my clothes (though I did end up leaving one of my pants there). The following morning we caught the first train into Wellington and boarded our boat.