Clay Cliffs

Hello everyone,

In this post I'll take you to one of my two other stops after my hike to the Mueller Hut. I hope I manage to show these three stops in the right order. If not, here's a hint: This is stop 1 after my hike to the Mueller Hut.

After an incredibly nice warm shower, I drove 1.5 hours towards the coast with a mini stopover in Twizel and arrived at the Clay Cliffs. Once again (much to Fridolin-Christopher's and my disappointment) a gravel road led here. Every meter on these roads hurts my soul for my tires and also for my shock absorbers. The speed limit here is usually 60 km/h, but I creep around like an old granny at a maximum of 30. When I see some people speeding along the gravel roads, I sometimes wonder whether they are all rental cars or whether it is simply wiser to drive as fast as possible. Perhaps one of you can answer that for me?

Anyway, back to the topic: Another stop at one of the Lord of the Rings filming locations and at the same time a surreal place in New Zealand. The Clay Cliffs are also a really popular item on the list of places to visit for tourists who don't even know that Lord of the Rings exists. This is because of the incredibly cool rock formation that just appears in the middle of a large field. After my hike, my feet had had enough of walking but they still carried me further into this adventure.

In The Lord of the Rings, this landscape was also used in the final installment to depict the mystical and spooky landscape where the followers of Isildur were banished to live as ghosts for not fulfilling their oath in battle. I climbed around in some of the ravines here and it was a sandy but fulfilling pleasure.
At first I also thought that the entrance to the area in the stones was the same entrance that Aragorn goes into when he leaves the camp of the Riders of Rohan and sets off for the spirits, but I'll definitely have to watch the film again in the coming days and weeks to find out.

Great experience in a surreal setting with the extra factor of being a Lord of the Rings filming location.

After about an hour of scrambling around in the sandy scenery, I made my way back to the road and drove to other cool rocks: the Elephant Rocks north of Oamaru.

In the next post you will see some pictures,
Your Britta