Days 364-369: Lima to Cusco

Things in South America started off a bit rough. By the time my flight got into Lima it was already dark out, and none of the ATMs in the airport accepted my credit card to get cash out. Since I knew I was going to be arriving late I'd booked a hostel for the first night near the airport, so after being unable to figure out any way to get money I decided to just walk from the airport to the place and try to figure it out there. I'd been warned by multiple people that Lima is one of those cities that you really need to be careful of as a tourist as there is a lot of crime, and walking with all my things through an industrial part of Lima late at night felt a little sketchy, but I didn't have any trouble. The hostel itself was well camoflaged and I had to buzz it to get somebody to come let me in. Luckily they were quite accomodating about the money and said I could pay when I checked out.

In the morning the hostel staff suggested where I might find an ATM that worked at a department/grocery store nearby. Walking around there were a few things that stood out. Over half the traffic on the street is taxis. There's no organized system of taxis, and no meters on them. Most people don't have cars, so they either take a scooter or take a taxi. People just negotiate a price before starting in, and if you don't like the price you just wave down the next taxi and negotiate with them instead. Another couple of observations were that all the buildings looked like they were unfinished. Most were either 2 or 3 stories tall, but all had exposed bars and walls for another floor on the top, but none had a roof. In my hostel the top "floor" had a few hammocks and a spot for table tennis on this exposed top floor, but a lot of them seemed to just be used to hang laundry, or abandoned entirely.
 

The part of town I was in was pretty run down, and other then the store I was walking to there were only a few barbershops and convenience stores that typically had the doorway barred so that you had to exchange goods and money through the bars without ever entering the shop. The store, when I got to it, was something like a Peruvian Walmart. The store itself had guards armed with rifles by the exits, but it was a pretty modern looking department store. I did find ATMs, one of which did give me money, so I headed back to the hostel to pay what I owed them. I'd booked another hostel in the nicer Miraflores District of Lima, and the guy at my hostel was nice enough to come out with me and haggle with a taxi to bring me there so that I didn't get ripped off. The taxi was running on fumes when I got in, and about halfway to my destination the taxi driver asked me to pay him so that he could get gas put in. This was strange enough that I got a bit suspicious, but I gave him the money and he got his gas and I got to my hostel safely. I guess they just do things a little differently in Lima.

After checking in I set about exploring Miraflores. It's a pretty nice area by the coast and has a lot more commercial buildings than where I'd been the previous night. It's anchored by a nice park full of feral cats, but also a hub for different events going on. While I was in Lima I came across a lot of music and dances going on, a few cultural events and some art and craft markets. One of the streets jutting off from the park is a popular shopping street for tourists that has numerous art, crafts, clothing, and souvenirs. If you head out towards the coast from the park you get to the coast, where there's a huge new shopping mall that's built right into the cliffside so that it's almost invisible until you're right above it. Some wings of it weren't even open yet (or were closed for renovation), but the shopping mall combined with the fancy hotels surrounding it were the most affluent part of Lima that I saw.

I'm not going to break everything down day by day, but here are some of the things I got up to in the few days I was in Lima.  I walked over to the Barranco District after a suggestion from one of the hostel staff. Wikipedia describes it as "the most romantic and bohemian" part of Lima, and it had a lot of nice old architecture.  I didn't really know where to go there, so I mostly just wandered, as is my style.

My ventures deeper into the city included a trip to the Larco Museum and visiting the historic city center. The Larco Museum is a private museum of pre-Columbian Peruvian art.  This is a culture/period that I really didn't know much about, so after all the European and Asian art and history it was interesting to get a taste of something completely different.

Like much of the nicer parts of the city the historic center is very European with narrow streets and ornate buildings.

During the taxi / bus rides around the city I spied some colourful looking art around an arena near the coast, so one of my days became a quest of following the coast north looking for this place without really knowing how far it was.  Almost the entire coast is just one park after another, so it's really quite a pleasant walk.  I did eventually find my goal, and I'll do a street art post on Lima next, but here are a few of the things I came across.  Discovering numerous parakeets just chilling in the park trees was especially nice, as you really realize just how tropical things are.

One of the major reasons for wanting to come to Peru was to do a specific hike, and said hike can only be booked in advance and through a group, so I had signed up for another tour for the rest of my time in Peru. I met up with them on my last night in Lima and we went out for a final Lima sea-food dinner before getting ready to fly into the mountains in the morning.

Days 361-363: Phoenix

Phoenix isn't much of a travel destination, and most of the travellers there are just passing through. I did my best to see the few sights around, going to the main art gallery for a couple hours before switching to my second hostel. Since I was going to be coming back to the first one the next day I left most of my things there and just took a few clothes to the other one. Downtown Phoenix isn't very big, and it only took a couple of hours to look around and stop by the different sports' stadiums. My favourite part of Phoenix was the Art District around Roosevelt Row, which was full of neat little galleries, cafes and alleyways of street art.

On my 3rd day, when I was back at the original hostel, I spent the evening hanging out with the hostel owners and some of the other guests. We played some board games and ended up going to the nearby park to play ultimate frisbee. When I played ultimate frisbee on the beach in New Zealand I was probably the worst player there, but the difference between playing with a group of very fit people who play 3 times a week and a group of fairly out of shape people who haven't played in years is pretty dramatic, and this time I got to be one of the stars. We spent the evening hanging out and drinking, and overall it was a really fun group of people to end my time in the US with.

My plane the last day didn't leave until late at night. I was taking a really budget airline (the only 2-star airline in North America), and they charged a lot extra for extra bags. By this point I have a backpack, my disintegrating messenger bag and another tote, and I really wanted to get that down to 2 items to save about $30 on the flight. I solved the problem by finding a duffel bag at a goodwill store for $4 and using that to combine two of my other bags. The airport I was flying out of wasn't actually in Phoenix, but in nearby Mesa, and I said my goodbyes in the evening and began the streetcar + 2 bus route trip of about 2.5 hours to get to the airport.

Days 354-355: Leaving San Fran

On my next day I explored further south in the city, mainly around the Mission and Castro Districts. There isn't much in the way of big sights around here, but there were a lot of cool little shops, and in the Mission District especially, lots of art. I also spent a chunk of the afternoon back downtown. I visited a small cartoon museum, which wasn't really as good as I'd hoped. I was hoping for more comic art, but it was largely either art from newspaper comics or from Bugs Bunny.

I had most of a day in the city the next day as well, since the bus I was taking out was a night one. There were no rides at this time of year directly through the mountains to Las Vegas, so instead I had to go all the way back to Los Angeles then transfer to a bus heading up into Nevada. I booked my ticket a few days in advance this time, so I at least got to go with Greyhound. The weather in the city was cold and cloudy before I had to leave, and I didn't really feel like walking around after spending the last 3 days walking almost non-stop. Instead I popped over to the San Francisco Public Library, picked out a book somebody had recommended that I'd been meaning to read, and just read through it all. To my amusement the book (which was an urban fantasy mystery, for lack of a closer genre) was set in San Francisco, so all the major locations in the book were places I'd visited in the last couple days. When I was finished the book I headed back to the hostel to get my bags out of storage and walked to the Greyhound station and eventually got on my bus.

Day 352: San Francisco

San Francisco is another of those American cities full of famous things - some of which I feel deserve the fame more than others. San Francisco also has a lot of art and culture, and that immediately made it more appealing for me than Los Angeles was. Because San Francisco is contained by the Bay, it's not all sprawled out like a lot of cities, and I can walk around everywhere pretty easily, and I tended to cover a lot of ground. I started off by heading south-east a bit to check out a specific street art murtal I wanted to see, then turned north-east and followed Mission St. up towards the harbor. Along the way I stopped at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I've expressed my mixed feelings about modern art before, but this is one of the most famous modern art galleries in the world, so I was curious to see what it would be like. Half the gallery was closed down as new installations were going up, but because of that the tickets were half price. It was a pretty cool gallery. The permanent collection had some things I liked and some I didn't. They had one exhibit up of Lebbeus Wood works that I really liked. He's an architect/artist, but a lot of his drawings and sculptures look like futuristic, sci-fi architecture.


When I reached the water I just followed it past all the piers until I got to Fisherman's Wharf, stopping to check out all the harbor seals and Alcatraz. There are lots of ferry tours out to Alcatraz, and I probably would have found it interesting, but it's one of those things where I feel it's reputation probably exceeds it's real interest to me, and I'm trying to save money, so I skipped it.


I stopped for lunch at Fisherman's Wharf, going to one of the famous In-N-Out Burgers. I've had multiple people from California that I've met tell me it's amazing, but I honestly don't really get what the hype is about. It was good, but no better than a lot of other burger chains around. I got some icecream afterwards and walked up the nearby hill to Lombard Street, which is known for being the crookedest street.


That was pretty much it for the day. I walked back towards the hostel from there, stopping to hang out in a park for a bit and cutting through China Town before wandering through the financial district and finally back to the hostel.

Day 327: Wellywood

New Zealand is well known for its beautiful scenery that's used in many tv shows and movies, most famously for Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit. It is also home to some of the best movie production and support companies in the world, and these companies are all clustered around Wellington, making it one of the top movie centers of the world. The most famous among them, and in large part the reason the city has developed such a reputation, is Weta. Weta began as a props/special effects company founded by Richard Taylor, Peter Jackson and Jamie Selkirk. In the beginning they did a lot of special effects for gory horror movies and the Hercules and Xena TV shows, but now they're the premier company in the business, having spread to digital effects, statues and figurines and being famous for their work on films like Lord of the Rings, King Kong, Chronicles of Narnia, Avatar, Tin Tin, Planet of the Apes (the new one), and so on.

There's a point in talking about all this, as my goal for the day was to visit the Weta Cave and Workshop. I made something of a mistake in walking to the place instead of taking the bus. It's technically not in Wellington but in Miramar, and while it didn't look too far on the map, the route I took along the coast ended up taking quite awhile and was made more unpleasant by the sun and heat. I'm pretty stubborn about walking places once I start though, and eventually made it to my goal.

The Weta Cave is a wonderland of props, reproductions, figurines and general film nerd-dom. It's a shop for the studio, and while the stuff is mostly way out of my price range it's still extremely cool to see. They also have a little theater showing a film about the company and the films it has worked on.

For the 20th anniversary of the company they also have been running special tours into the workshop. The tours are done by members of the actual props/special effects staff. They can't show what they're developing for new movies, but they walk you through how each of the different departments work and tell lots of stories about the things they've created for past films. There's also tons of weapons, models, figurines and all manner of weird props covering just about every inch of wall and ceiling space. Sadly the tour didn't allow photos, but you can get a general idea of the sort of things from the Cave pictures.

I decided to walk back to the hostel, but instead of following the coast I cut through the tunnel under the mountain which made it a much shorter walk.

Days 325-326: Wellington

I had a few more places I wanted to visit on the north island, but the timing was going to work out better to do it on my way back up to Auckland to fly out, so I decided to move on down to Wellington for a few days before crossing over to the south island. My bus out of Rotorua left in the afternoon so it was already pretty late in the day when I got into Wellington and found my hostel. Wellington itself is a lovely city. It's a lot smaller than Auckland, but still large enough to have lots to do. The city center stretches out near the water with the city spreading over the surrounding hills, and there are lots of little artsy places spread through town. My hostel was just across the street from the city art gallery, but unfortunately half of it was closed down and the other half was pretty dull. Much more interesting was the museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. A lot of the exhibits in it were on New Zealand history and nature, which were things I didn't really know very much about. Completely unrelated to all that, was this giant sculpture.

This is one of the works by Weta, which is probably the most famous props/special effect companies in the world. More on them later! Since it was a nice day out I was mostly just happy to wander through town and explore without any real direction.

Day 323: Trip to Middle-Earth

Around noon I got on a bus to take a trip over to Matamata to visit the Alexander sheep farm, which is a sprawling farm of rolling hills that houses over 12,000 sheep. Oh, (as if you didn't guess from the post title) it's also the home of the Shire movie sets (Hobbiton and The Green Dragon Inn) from Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. When Peter Jackson was looking for film locations prior to making Lord of the Rings he did a helicopter search of the surrounding farmlands, and took interest in the Alexander's farm because of rolling hills, lake and suitable party tree, background of mountains in the distance, and lack of any visable roads or power lines to deal with. The "set" is basically the entire town of Hobbiton in ridiculous detail, including branches of town that cost millions of dollars to build and ultimately got cut from the movies entirely.

In addition to getting to walk around all of Hobbiton, our guide told us lots of stories about the creation of Hobbiton and the challenges of filming. All these little anecdotes were a really cool addition, and I'll mention a few of the ones that I remember off the top of my head.
-The gnarled oak tree sitting on top of Bag End wasn't originally part of the farm. Instead, a tree for a nearby farm was numbered, chopped up and then wired back together on the set. Since the tree was obviously now dead, 250,000 fake oak leaves were imported from Taiwan and wired by hand onto the tree just before filming was supposed to begin. Unfortunately Peter Jackson fell sick and filming was delayed for a couple weeks. The weather had enough of an effect on the colour of the fake leaves that Peter Jackson sent people up to hand-paint all 250,000 leaves before they finally got around to filming it. The actual tree is maybe in the movies for 10 seconds. For The Hobbit they dismantled the old dead tree and used the parts to make casts for a more permanent replacement, which of course required wiring 250,000 more fake leaves onto the new version as well.
- Near the beginning of The Hobbit (very minor spoiler) there's a scene in Bag End when Gandalf bumps his head on a chandelier, then turns and bumps his head again on the door frame. Only the first of these was scripted, and Ian McKellen actually hurt himself on the second one. Peter Jackson thought it was hilarious and kept it in the movie.
- All the fruit trees on set are dwarf apple and pear varities, because they look more size appropriate than full-sized fruit trees. Unfortunately in the books the fruit trees in Hobbiton are described as being plum trees, so before filming every single fruit and leaf were removed from the trees, and plum leaves and fruit were attached in their place.
- For Bilbo's party and the Green Dragon scenes they came up with a special beer that tastes like normal beer, but is only 1% alcohol so that multiple takes wouldn't turn into a bunch of drunk hobbit actors stumbling around.
- In the scene in Lord of the Rings when Merry and Pippin steal Gandalf's fireworks, they used a small explosion to cue the actors for timing when it was going off. Billy Boyd (Pippin) was startled by the explosion and apparently let out an unscripted high-pitched squeal when it went off. Peter Jackson thought it was hilarious (this is a common trend) and kept it in the film.

After getting a tour around Hobbiton we crossed by the watermill and over the bridge to The Green Dragon Inn, where we got to lounge around and enjoy a free drink (real ones, not the 1% prop stuff).

Anyway, since this is what people really care about, here's pictures!

Days 317-319: Auckland

I had an early morning flight out of Sydney, so I got to New Zealand with still quite a bit of time left in the day. My hostel wasn't as central as a lot of them have been, but despite being by far the largest city in New Zealand it's still pretty small by international standards, and walking around is pretty convenient. There really wasn't all that much I wanted to do in Auckland. It's just another city, and I'll be in it again to flight out anyway, so I spent my days there focused more on planning out other upcoming things. I bought a bus pass with Naked Bus, which is one of the discount coach bus lines in New Zealand. New Zealand has really nice intercity bus systems, and the bus pass I got gives me 17 rides from anywhere to anywhere in New Zealand (excluding crossing between islands as part of a trip) for about $180 CDN. I very much doubt I'll be able to use all 17 trips, but I'll definitely be using enough to make the pass worthwhile. I also bought a cheap New Zealand pay-as-you-go cell phone since it makes the bus stuff much, much easier, and it will help with some of the national park bookings I need to do.

I did manage to see a fair bit of Auckland just walking around when the weather was nice. It's art gallery, while not as large and impressive as the ones in Melbourne and Sydney still had a nice collection. The museum was pretty far away from the city center, and while I vaguely tried to find it once it apparently cost quite a bit to get in, and I wasn't interested enough to really pursue it when I couldn't find it easily. Auckland also has one of those sky tower things vaguely like the CN Tower that pretty much every country seems to have now.