Canterbury Surprise: The Foothills of the Alps

A Maverick Traveller: The Podcasts of Mary Jane Walker

Christchurch, New Zealand, has some amazing Lord of the Rings country to its north & west. You don’t have to go far from town to get there!

Looking at just one of these areas, the Hakatere Conservation Park, it's close to Erewhon, the setting of the English writer Samuel Butler’s fictional utopia Erewhon,but also an actual place.

This district includes an isolated hill with sweeping views called Mount Sunday, so-called because riders from several areas would meet up there each Sunday to swap news. Mount Sunday is otherwise best known as the site of Edoras in the Lord of the Rings movies. They say that this is one of the most remote Lord of the Rings sites that you can easily get to, and the whole area is Lord of the Rings country, really.

The Te Araroa Trail runs through here, and from Lake Clearwater you can venture along a section of the trail. And also do the Mystery Lake track, which runs along the edge of the stunning ravine of the Potts River for part of the way, and then via the Mystery Lake Link Track to the Potts Hut Track, which leads in one direction to the Boundary Creek Hut, and in another to the Potts Hut on Mount Potts.

In earlier times, a part of this area was also a major Māori food-gathering area, called Ō Tū Wharekai, (or alternately, in English, the Ashburton Lakes). The Māori name builds on the word for banquet hall or dining room (wharekai). The area is also one through which people used to travel on the way to gather pounamu or New Zealand jade on the West Coast, stocking up on food as they did so.‍

Original blog post: maverick.com/blog/the-foothills-of-the-alps