Auckland – The fellowship is broken. Dave has taken Chris II overland to Auckland, while Demetre and I have chosen to attack it from the sea, which worked so well for us in Wellington. The ferry runs from Coromandel to Auckland in the evenings, a barnstorming run across the strait under a waxing moon that gets us into port around eleven o’clock. We fly home tomorrow.
The Lord of the Rings got to New Zealand first and it’s obviously the fantasy property with which the country will forever be associated (for better or worse, in a huge jumble of ways). It’s indescribable and marginally alarming to think back on how many different types of environments we’ve moved through in the course of three weeks – flatlands, mountains, river valleys, rain forests, glaciers, deserts, scrub land, farms, coastal villages. That one can frame a series of movies with locations this diverse which are nonetheless all within twelve hours’ drive of one another, give or take, is remarkable, and my most enthusiastic compliments go to Mr. Jackson’s location scouts – it’s one thing to see the finished product on film, but you have to take the drive out to Matamata or Mount Sunday to realize just how genuinely incredible it is that someone found those locations at all, let alone seeing how they could be used for their Middle-Earth equivalents, and making it happen.
But in spite of the Ringsiness of everything, I think I got an even stronger Narnia vibe out of the place than I did anything Tolkienish. Narnia has stuck with me a long time, even if I’ve mostly outgrown it – I now think of C.S. Lewis like a lunatic grandfather who had an incalculable influence on the development of my psyche but whose opinions about the world I now don’t agree with at all. Regardless, the displaced otherworldliness of all my experiences here has that very through-the-wardrobe sort of feel to it. I’m not really referring to the movies, which were shot here but weren’t very good; but I certainly walked in Aslan’s country down south, more than once, as vivid and verdant as anything I ever saw in my mind’s eye when I was twelve. And this week, upon arriving on the Coromandel Peninsula, we hiked out to Cathedral Cove, which was used in the second Narnia movie and nearly approximates the crashing beaches around the ruins of Cair Paravel that lives in my mind. This place gleams, and seems so frequently like a waking dream that after a point one simply stops bothering to question it. I can’t see, really, why anyone would ever want to leave.
Our last hike, yesterday, took us out to Port Jackson (yes – Port Jackson) to do the Coromandel Coastal Walk, a full-day hike that took us out around the edge of the peninsula, over rich green mountains and across sloping sheep-dotted hills, along paths which dropped away sharply in hundred-foot plunges to crashing waves far below, and past jet-black rocky shoals being ceaselessly pounded by frothing cerulean waves. In other words, it was yet another incarnation of heaven, with glistening New Zealand unfolding herself for us once again. When we reached Stony Cove, the end of the hike, we found ourselves in a wide, silent bay, ringed by thick forest enclosing a stony shore. And since I wasn’t likely to ever be back to that place and since leaving any action untaken is a shame under such circumstances, I stripped naked and dove into the bay, and swam around in the sunshine for ten or fifteen of the most perfect minutes of my life. There is peace and freedom here that cannot be bought at any price. At the end of the long walk back to our car and the beginning of a very long trip home, I took off my boots and brought it in Hobbitstyles for the last kilometre of the track – barefoot in the grass. Any exhaustion seemed very far away.
I have seen shades of green in this country that I have never seen anywhere else. Blues too – though I don’t pay much attention to them. Browns – you would not believe the browns I’ve seen. And stars like the light in her eyes that will stay with me the rest of my life.
There is something I noticed way down in the South Island very early on the trip, when hiking the second or third of our many tramps: these people don’t litter. Miles and miles of hiking ground, and on exactly one occasion – ONE – I saw a discarded bottle of Coke. I choose to believe that this is down to the cathedral-like reverence that overcomes anyone faced with such astonishing natural beauty; you take out what you bring in, and don’t fuck it up for everyone else, or for the environment itself, or for yourself. This tells you a lot, I think, about everyone in this country. They don’t litter. There are responsible recycling choices everywhere. Every menu calls out its gluten-free options. And of the six or seven million GIVE WAY signs we passed over the course of the road trip, only one was modified to read GIVE HEAD. Every New Zealander is unselfconsciously proud of the place – and unimaginably friendly about it – and as invested in your enjoyment of their home as they are themselves. They enjoy their riches to the utmost. New Zealand is a kind place, full of adventurers.
To the one who gave me the journal I’ve carried in my bag across every step of this journey, and for all the words that followed, I cannot sufficiently express my thanks. To the others: Dave, who took on every detail, every logistic, every fiddly bit of business that needed fiddling with, and did it brilliantly; Demetre, who is indomitable and really knows how to kiss; and my parents, who coached from the sidelines – thanks all. To them and everyone else, this advice: travel. Far, often, and well.
