We waited for the clouds to clear before driving out to Dry Creek Quarry where Peter Jackson and his crew shot Helms Deep and Minas Tirith scenes for LOTR. We couldn't drive into the working quarry and had to be content with pictures of the entrance (scenes were shot beyond the road leading off to the right). We made a big loop over to Porirua on our way to Wellington and back up to the Hutt River in Upper Hutt. Here, we found where they had filmed several scenes of the River Anduin and the point where Aragorn is washed ashore after his fight with the orc and warg. As Peter Jackson remarked, it was hard to believe that such rural landscape existed within 20 minutes of downtown Wellington.