New Zealand / Aotearoa 2017

You might be wondering, why it was so quiet in July on Chaosbunker. The ones following me on facebook, might have seen it - I was in New Zealand / Aotearoa for a month.

It was a great journey and I'm very lucky and happy to have experience the islands for this amount of time. The tour began in Auckland and ended in Christchurch, covering both, the northern and the southern Island, as well as many miles of road along the coast and through the central parts. I'm going to share my impressions from this beautiful country with you in the upcoming weeks, as there are quite a lot of things to see that are interesting for wargamers of all kind.

You can't talk about New Zealand and not think about the recreation of JRR Tolkiens Middleearth by Peter Jackson, so Hobbiton was a must for us to see. I took a lot of pictures, as the details in the little town are an amazing ressource for terrain builders. Hobbiton alone justifies an article for itself - so stay around for that to follow.

All over the islands, especially in the cities are a lot of memorial buildings, dedicated to the ones who lost their lifes in the world wars. Even the museums, that cover a lot of different topics, are focused by name to the wars.

Many of the museums cover interesting pieces from back to the colonial times, over distributions by Weta Workshop or tanks.

And as a huge Perry fan, you can't be in New Zealand and not visit the Great War Exhibition by Peter Jackson, with the insanely huge Battle for Chunik Bair display with more than 5,000 miniatures. You can see a lot of the building process over here by the Armchair General. I'll dedicate an individual article to the museum and display as well.

The different landscapes with hard constrasts, so close together, sometimes even just half an hour apart, are incredibly impressive. I enjoyed this personal "Grand Tour", driving the empty roads through the serpentine roads of the mountains and long straights through the valleys. Some of them feel very familiar from home (regardless of where home is for you, as I felt remembered to half of europe through the journey) and others are so exotic and alien, that I made pictures of them as well. Those are very interesting ressources and ideas for terrain building, from settings like Lord of the Rings up to alien planets far away.

I spend most of the time in the countryside with few to no people around, so the few stays in the cities were are hard contrast. In Christchurch I managed to meet up with a buddy of mine, Falk from Tabletop Fix. Other than that, I had very little direct contact with our hobby down in NZ, but my fingers are already tingling to get back to my desk.

So what's next? I just arrived yesterday morning after two ~ 11h flights from Christchurch via Singapore in Frankfurt. Jetlag didn't hit me that hard, so I'm quite close to functional. I'll have to pick up a few packages that arrived here during my travel (excited!) and have to further sort out the images for the New Zealand coverage. I wouldn't expect another update this weekend already, but very likely early next week. That's it for today, have a great remaining weekend and take care!