IgoUgo

Things To Do in Queenstown

Deer Park LOTR Tour

  • Info & Track Centre, Queenstown
    Queenstown
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Deer Park LOTR Tour

  • stomps from Houston
  • April 21, 2006
He's not desperate for food.More Photos
This tour was the afternoon segment of the Paradise Found combo I bought from the Info & Track Centre in Queenstown. Overall, the tour only cost $130 for a full day of touring around various sites near Queenstown, which I didn't find to be a bad deal at all.

There were around the same number of people on this section of the tour--5 or 6--as in the morning. We had a different tour guide, and while he was not nearly as animated and excited as our tour guide in the morning, he was still very informative and likable.

On our way up to Deer Park Heights, the sole destination of our afternoon's tour, we got to see a long video about Deer Park. I didn't watch too much of it due to my extreme motion sickness though. When we finally got up into Deer Park, our first stop was near the donkeys, horses, and pigs pen; it was probably around this point, if not before, that we realized it was a wildlife tour as much as a LOTR tour, but none of us minded.

After feeding the horses and watching the donkeys make asses out of themselves (see picture), we headed a bit further up the hill (for reference, Deer Park is a hilly peninsula between Queenstown and the Remarkables, so it gets spectacular views of both). We stopped at a great lookout overlooking the Kawarau River (and even saw the Kawarau Jets speeding up and down it). I also got the best view of the airport here as I ever got, since it was fogged out the next day.

A bit farther up the hill, we found out why Peter Jackson had to take down all of his sets when he was finished. Sitting near the top of Deer Park is a set from a 1980s Disney movie about Korean prisoners, which is now dilapidated and in need of being torn down. But we soon drove past this and got to the real highlight of the tour: scenery from the Lord of the Rings. We stood in the location that they filmed the people of Edoras walking around a lake towards Helms Deep at--even if you aren't a fan of the movies, the backdrop of the Remarkables is spectacular and very worth seeing, probably more so when they are covered in snow! We also saw various other scenes, like where the battle with the wargs took place and the rock Aragorn got dragged from into the river below.

Besides all this, there were striking views of Lake Wakatipu, the Remarkables (so named because they run directly north-south) and Queenstown from nearly every angle at the top. Plus, on the way down, we saw goats, yaks, buffalo (which I hadn't seen "wild" in America!), and lots of very hungry deer. We even got to watch while some llamas blocked the road and then spat on the bus. Overall, a very diverse, interesting, and fun tour, even for the non-LOTR-lovers.
From journal Adventures in Queenstown