A decade ago, the small South Pacific country of New Zealand’s signature within global culture was its sheep-to-human ratio. Most people could not pinpoint it on a map, and, to those who could, it was nothing more than Australia’s inferior cousin. But that’s all changing now. While farming – namely, dairy – remains integral to New Zealand’s economy, it has been surpassed in recent years by tourism as the country’s largest export industry. As of February 2009, according to the Ministry of Tourism, tourism accounted for 18.3 percent of New Zealand’s total export earnings, and employed nearly 10 percent of the country’s workforce[i].
Although interest in New Zealand as a destination has been increasing steadily over the years, the country was really thrust into the international spotlight when a hobbit named Frodo Baggins walked into frame on 5,700 movie screens worldwide on December 19, 2001[ii]. “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, directed by New Zealand-native Peter Jackson and utilizing the country as a backdrop, acted as one of the largest advertisements for destination tourism ever.
The New Zealand government predicted the economic boost it would receive from the films, and latched onto them as a vehicle for tourism marketing before the films were even released. In 2001, then-prime minister Helen Clark said, “Set against the spectacular and diverse New Zealand landscape, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy has the potential to be a major tourist promotion and investment tool for years to come[iii].” She was right. Collector stamps and coins were minted, billboards were painted on the sides of Air New Zealand jets, and the government appointed a “Minister of the Rings” whose job it was to maximize the benefits from the trilogy[iv]. Tourism New Zealand launched a special tourism Web site for “The Lord of the Rings,” and coordinated part of their “100% Pure New Zealand” campaign to paint the country as “The Real Middle-Earth.”
Even though J.R.R. Tolkien originally wrote the books to serve as the mythology England was lacking, New Zealanders embraced the films as a cultural product of their own making. For the 2003 world premiere of “Return of the King,” the third and final installment in the trilogy, New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington was transformed into Middle-Earth. Gollum loomed over the airport, Ringwraiths and trolls clung to the sides of downtown buildings, and hundreds of thousands of residents and visitors lined the streets for a giant tickertape parade honoring the filmmakers and cast[v]. The eyes of the cinematic community were on New Zealand. And the country didn’t disappoint.
By the time “The Return of the King” won all eleven of the Oscars it was nominated for at the 2004 Academy Awards, New Zealand was already capitalizing on the increased international attention it was receiving. Specialized “Lord of the Rings” tour companies were popping up in all corners of the country, offering everything from themed 4-wheel Jeep rides and horseback treks to helicopter excursions and week-long journeys to view filming locations. In the years that have passed since New Zealand tourism companies first began using “The Lord of the Rings” as inspiration, one company has emerged as a frontrunner: Red Carpet Tours.
preface: red carpet tours
Founded in 2001 by retired school principal Vic James and his wife Raewyn, Red Carpet Tours offers small groups of devoted “Lord of the Rings” fans the chance to travel together through New Zealand – or Middle-Earth – for twelve days, while visiting filming sites and meeting individuals who were involved in the films. Highlights for tour members include scrambling into hobbit holes in Matamata, climbing Edoras in Canterbury, walking through the woods of Lothlorien in Featherston, charging across the Pelennor Fields in Twizel, and experiencing movie-making magic first-hand in Wellington.With their intimate, laid-back tours, Vic and Raewyn have turned Red Carpet Tours into the premiere “Lord of the Rings” tour company in New Zealand. But their success didn’t come without hard work. Vic, after retiring from education, began his foray into tourism with an airport shuttle company, and followed with a share in a high-end limo company. Eventually, he said he was ready for something different.
“I was looking for a niche market,” he said. “You know, something that was really specific; new; fresh. And, about that time, Peter Jackson was in the process of filming, and we saw lots of photographs of the different sets, and I just thought it would be a great idea to take people to those locations.”
Vic began researching the films, reading Tolkien’s novels, and contacting owners of property used in the trilogy. From there, Vic said, things started to fall into place. Since the first Red Carpet Tour in 2001, the company has been nurturing relationships with “Lord of the Rings” contacts and tweaking its tours to make them as tailored to the fans’ desires and expectations as possible.
“It’s all about the fans,” Vic said. “We do this for them.”
This dedication to enthusiastic “Lord of the Rings” fans from around the world who are seeking a true Middle-Earth experience is what sets Red Carpet Tours apart. Their numbers – roughly 100 customers per year – may not be as impressive as those of other, less-specific companies, but Vic and Raewyn’s passion and commitment are what draws fans – often multiple times – to Red Carpet Tours.
introduction
In the travel narrative that follows, I aimed to delve into the niche market of “Lord of the Rings” tourism in New Zealand, focusing on Red Carpet Tours and the people who are a part of them. Through travel writing, I strove to capture not only the beauty of New Zealand and charm of Red Carpet Tours, but also the unique characters of the people who travel halfway around the world in order to experience Middle-Earth.
It’s hard to believe that I have been having a mild love affair with “The Lord of the Rings” for more than seven years now. It seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in a movie theater not long after New Year’s, getting absorbed in a story about little people with hairy feet trying to destroy a piece of jewelry. Even harder to believe is the fact that I, a small-town girl from northeast Ohio, took that obsession seriously enough to make it all the way to New Zealand (home of Middle-Earth) more than three years ago, when I toured the country for two weeks.
But the hardest thing for me to believe is that my love of “Lord of the Rings” and, subsequently, New Zealand, led me to move 10,000 miles away from home to live there for five months. If someone would have told me after my first jaunt to Middle-Earth that I would be living there someday, I don’t know that I would have believed them. But, somehow, July 2008 found me packing my allotted two suitcases in preparation to move to Wellington, New Zealand.
Now that I’ve returned, I still have some difficulty comprehending how I ended up there to begin with. I guess the hobbit Bilbo Baggins knew what he was talking about when he said, “It’s a dangerous business going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you might be swept off to.”
It’s hard to believe that I have been having a mild love affair with “The Lord of the Rings” for more than seven years now. It seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in a movie theater not long after New Year’s, getting absorbed in a story about little people with hairy feet trying to destroy a piece of jewelry. Even harder to believe is the fact that I, a small-town girl from northeast Ohio, took that obsession seriously enough to make it all the way to New Zealand (home of Middle-Earth) more than three years ago, when I toured the country for two weeks.
But the hardest thing for me to believe is that my love of “Lord of the Rings” and, subsequently, New Zealand, led me to move 10,000 miles away from home to live there for five months. If someone would have told me after my first jaunt to Middle-Earth that I would be living there someday, I don’t know that I would have believed them. But, somehow, July 2008 found me packing my allotted two suitcases in preparation to move to Wellington, New Zealand.
Now that I’ve returned, I still have some difficulty comprehending how I ended up there to begin with. I guess the hobbit Bilbo Baggins knew what he was talking about when he said, “It’s a dangerous business going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you might be swept off to.”
above the clouds
The view out the small plane window was largely unremarkable as we reached cruising altitude above the foothills of the Wellington region, the southernmost reach of New Zealand’s north island. The aerial view of the Rimutaka Range, the low mountains that force the country’s capital city to hug the Pacific coastline, would likely have been stunning on that late winter morning. There may have been a few last traces of snow present on the first day of August, or perhaps the first hints of the prickly, yellow gorse bushes that would begin to cover the hillsides in spring. Both of these views – and any others in between – were made impossible, however, by the thick, low clouds that had settled right at the base of the Rimutakas. Crossing my fingers and hoping for clearer skies later, I settled for watching fat droplets of water condense outside the thick window pane as the New Zealand landscape slipped by beneath a soggy grey blanket.
Fortune must have been looking favorably upon me that morning, however, because the skies began to clear the further north we flew. By the time our Boeing 737 began its descent toward Auckland, dazzling rays of sunlight were piercing the wispy clouds, and the ground as far as I could see had been transformed into a rolling sea of green beneath our wings. It was hard to believe that less than an hour before I had been fighting for control of my umbrella with a strong Wellington southerly and its horizontal rain.
I craned my neck, straining to see if I could pick out the sheep that dotted the green hills or the coast that I knew couldn’t be very far away. We passed briefly through one last trace of a low cloud, and, bursting through the other side, were greeted by a stunning swath of deepest green stretching all the way to the sea. My mind immediately wandered to a line from Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, describing when the hobbit Frodo first sees Valinor, the elves’ Undying Lands. Tolkien wrote that, “the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.” For a moment, I felt as if I, too, was looking upon some eternal green land; Middle-Earth.
Fortune must have been looking favorably upon me that morning, however, because the skies began to clear the further north we flew. By the time our Boeing 737 began its descent toward Auckland, dazzling rays of sunlight were piercing the wispy clouds, and the ground as far as I could see had been transformed into a rolling sea of green beneath our wings. It was hard to believe that less than an hour before I had been fighting for control of my umbrella with a strong Wellington southerly and its horizontal rain.
I craned my neck, straining to see if I could pick out the sheep that dotted the green hills or the coast that I knew couldn’t be very far away. We passed briefly through one last trace of a low cloud, and, bursting through the other side, were greeted by a stunning swath of deepest green stretching all the way to the sea. My mind immediately wandered to a line from Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, describing when the hobbit Frodo first sees Valinor, the elves’ Undying Lands. Tolkien wrote that, “the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.” For a moment, I felt as if I, too, was looking upon some eternal green land; Middle-Earth.
arrival
Though the main motivation for the trip up to Auckland was to see New Zealand’s national rugby team, the All Blacks, take on the Australian Wallabies, a group of six international students – including me – from Massey University had also planned to take a day trip to Matamata, where the Hobbiton scenes in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy were filmed.
As the six of us filed through the turnstile that marked our entrance into the small arrivals area of the Auckland Domestic Airport, we were immediately greeted by a grinning Vic James. Vic, co-owner and operator of Red Carpet Tours, would be our guide for the day.
“Good to see you again!” Without even waiting for a handshake, he promptly wrapped me in a big bear hug, his protruding belly limiting how close we could get. “How long has it been now? Two years?”
“Three,” I corrected him, smiling. “It’s good to be back.”
This wasn’t my first time in New Zealand, nor would it be my first time visiting the Hobbiton site. In 2005, following my high school graduation and after three years of saving my meager paychecks from my job at a movie theater, I joined a Red Carpet Tour in order to see New Zealand. I spent twelve days traversing the country with Vic, his wife and tourism partner Raewyn, and nine “Ringers” (code for “Lord of the Rings” fans) from around the world. Like most Red Carpet groups, we had gone to New Zealand an eclectic hodgepodge of strangers with nothing in common except our love for hobbits, elves, and all things Middle-Earth. But after traipsing through snow on the side of a volcano, fording mountain streams bare-legged in the dead of winter, and sharing more than a few laughs at our own expense, that one commonality was more than enough to break down the barriers of age, culture, and language, making way for friendships and lasting memories.
The situation that day in Auckland wasn’t so dissimilar. Though I knew Josh, Jen, Denise, Una, and Melinda from Massey orientation and shared university activities, this was the first time we were all travelling as a group. We were only going to spend a day in Middle-Earth together, but, standing in the arrivals area of the airport with our adventure just about to begin, I already felt as though we shared something unique.
I quickly introduced everyone in the group to Vic, rattling off where each of them was from: Iowa via California, Illinois, Vermont, North Carolina, and Germany. Vic enveloped each of their hands between both of his, grinning and welcoming them in turn to Auckland. There were a few “Cheers, mate”s thrown in, one or two from Vic and the others from Jen, Josh, and Una.
The Americans in our group, after living in New Zealand for a month, were already starting to pick up certain turns of phrase and slang words used by the locals. The current favorite seemed to be the word “cheers,” which is a sort of blanket term that can apply to anything from “Hello” to “Thank you.” I often felt awkward using it, partly because I didn’t think it sounded as sincere as a good old-fashioned “Thank you.” And I also knew I sounded dumb because, when used by us Yanks, “Cheers, mate” just lacks something – namely, the cool Kiwi accent.
As the six of us filed through the turnstile that marked our entrance into the small arrivals area of the Auckland Domestic Airport, we were immediately greeted by a grinning Vic James. Vic, co-owner and operator of Red Carpet Tours, would be our guide for the day.
“Good to see you again!” Without even waiting for a handshake, he promptly wrapped me in a big bear hug, his protruding belly limiting how close we could get. “How long has it been now? Two years?”
“Three,” I corrected him, smiling. “It’s good to be back.”
This wasn’t my first time in New Zealand, nor would it be my first time visiting the Hobbiton site. In 2005, following my high school graduation and after three years of saving my meager paychecks from my job at a movie theater, I joined a Red Carpet Tour in order to see New Zealand. I spent twelve days traversing the country with Vic, his wife and tourism partner Raewyn, and nine “Ringers” (code for “Lord of the Rings” fans) from around the world. Like most Red Carpet groups, we had gone to New Zealand an eclectic hodgepodge of strangers with nothing in common except our love for hobbits, elves, and all things Middle-Earth. But after traipsing through snow on the side of a volcano, fording mountain streams bare-legged in the dead of winter, and sharing more than a few laughs at our own expense, that one commonality was more than enough to break down the barriers of age, culture, and language, making way for friendships and lasting memories.
The situation that day in Auckland wasn’t so dissimilar. Though I knew Josh, Jen, Denise, Una, and Melinda from Massey orientation and shared university activities, this was the first time we were all travelling as a group. We were only going to spend a day in Middle-Earth together, but, standing in the arrivals area of the airport with our adventure just about to begin, I already felt as though we shared something unique.
I quickly introduced everyone in the group to Vic, rattling off where each of them was from: Iowa via California, Illinois, Vermont, North Carolina, and Germany. Vic enveloped each of their hands between both of his, grinning and welcoming them in turn to Auckland. There were a few “Cheers, mate”s thrown in, one or two from Vic and the others from Jen, Josh, and Una.
The Americans in our group, after living in New Zealand for a month, were already starting to pick up certain turns of phrase and slang words used by the locals. The current favorite seemed to be the word “cheers,” which is a sort of blanket term that can apply to anything from “Hello” to “Thank you.” I often felt awkward using it, partly because I didn’t think it sounded as sincere as a good old-fashioned “Thank you.” And I also knew I sounded dumb because, when used by us Yanks, “Cheers, mate” just lacks something – namely, the cool Kiwi accent.
the accent
If you’ve never heard a New Zealand accent before, it can sound like quite a garbled mess at first, so it probably deserves a brief explanation. There’s a good bit of Australian accent there (probably because the first settlers to New Zealand other than the Maori were seal hunters from Australia), but also a fair amount of British influence. Add in a slight Scottish lilt (especially in the south, where they still have a tendency to roll their “r”s), and perhaps you can begin to understand what a Kiwi (“Kiwi” here meaning a New Zealander, not a fuzzy fruit or flightless bird) sounds like. Or maybe not. It’s a lot to try and piece together, after all. But that’s exactly what a New Zealand dialect is – a conglomeration of all sorts of accents that, somehow, manage to form into a cohesive way of speaking – at least as far as New Zealanders are concerned. Personally, I’m still trying to make sense of it.
An “i” will usually turn into a “u,” an “a” can often transform into an “i,” and, when it comes to the letter “e,” good luck trying to predict how it will be pronounced. “R”s often disappear, only to be snuck back into sentences in places where they really don’t belong. So whereas we Americans might say, “Yes, I saw you ordered the fish and chips again,” a Kiwi would say, “Yis, I soar you orded the fush end chups ageen.”
Unlike some foreign accents, New Zealand’s doesn’t really vary drastically from region to region. Of course, North Islanders (mainly Aucklanders and Wellingtonians) will accuse South Islanders (especially those from Invercargill) of bumbling around their words (not unlike Ohioans poking fun at West Virginians for their dialect), but my experience is that most of it seems to be nothing more than island rivalry. I’ve been to Invercargill, and they still sounded like Kiwis to me.
An “i” will usually turn into a “u,” an “a” can often transform into an “i,” and, when it comes to the letter “e,” good luck trying to predict how it will be pronounced. “R”s often disappear, only to be snuck back into sentences in places where they really don’t belong. So whereas we Americans might say, “Yes, I saw you ordered the fish and chips again,” a Kiwi would say, “Yis, I soar you orded the fush end chups ageen.”
Unlike some foreign accents, New Zealand’s doesn’t really vary drastically from region to region. Of course, North Islanders (mainly Aucklanders and Wellingtonians) will accuse South Islanders (especially those from Invercargill) of bumbling around their words (not unlike Ohioans poking fun at West Virginians for their dialect), but my experience is that most of it seems to be nothing more than island rivalry. I’ve been to Invercargill, and they still sounded like Kiwis to me.
vic
I can tell you that Vic, being from the North Shore of Auckland, has a rather mild accent compared to most New Zealanders. It’s usually possible to distinguish his “bear” from his “beer,” and his “six” doesn’t tend to come out sounding like a dirty word. Perhaps it’s from having worked with children, and then foreign tourists for so long. Or perhaps it’s just a North Shore thing. Regardless of the reasons for his good diction, none of us had any trouble understanding our guide as he shepherded us outside the airport to where his twelve-seater Mercedes Sprinter was parked.
As he led us to the parking lot, I smiled, pleased to see that the past three years had failed to change him in the least. Vic looked the same as I remembered him. He was wearing a local rugby polo shirt and his signature bone Koru necklace – a spiraling Maori symbol carved like an unfurling fern to represent growth, strength, peace, and eternity – around a thick neck. He was plump and balding, but still walked with a spring in his step. Were he a bit younger (i.e. young enough to still have hair) and disinclined to sport footwear, he would be the epitome of Tolkien’s hobbit.
As it is, Vic lives up to quite a few of Tolkien’s key descriptors of hobbits, such as being round and short of stature, and having a beardless, “good-natured” face. Unlike a hobbit, however, Vic’s face, good-natured as it is, is set off by a slender, pointed nose and keen, dark eyes that always seem to harbor a hint of mischief in them. And, whereas Tolkien’s hobbits are averse to any sort of adventure or complex thinking, I think it’s safe to say that Vic is quite the opposite.
As he led us to the parking lot, I smiled, pleased to see that the past three years had failed to change him in the least. Vic looked the same as I remembered him. He was wearing a local rugby polo shirt and his signature bone Koru necklace – a spiraling Maori symbol carved like an unfurling fern to represent growth, strength, peace, and eternity – around a thick neck. He was plump and balding, but still walked with a spring in his step. Were he a bit younger (i.e. young enough to still have hair) and disinclined to sport footwear, he would be the epitome of Tolkien’s hobbit.
As it is, Vic lives up to quite a few of Tolkien’s key descriptors of hobbits, such as being round and short of stature, and having a beardless, “good-natured” face. Unlike a hobbit, however, Vic’s face, good-natured as it is, is set off by a slender, pointed nose and keen, dark eyes that always seem to harbor a hint of mischief in them. And, whereas Tolkien’s hobbits are averse to any sort of adventure or complex thinking, I think it’s safe to say that Vic is quite the opposite.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
