"But I don't think I ought to leave my friends like this," (said Bilbo), "after all we have gone through together.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
They are bittersweet, these few days, because they are days of peace and pleasure, but also of goodbyes.
We make way to Tauranga, where we will bid farewell both to Tauranga itself and to Roxi, via a jet boat ride in Whakatane.
The ride is very different to the one we had taken before in Murchison, though no less special. The river is beautiful and we are driven down it by a friendly and warm spirited man who takes obvious pride in showing off the striking natural rick and waterways. He drives fast, and performs '360°' turns just as in Murchison, including one part in which we duck beneath a fallen tree, hanging over the river, but his emphasis is firmly on the verdant, reflective surroundings and the birds that inhabit them. It's a different kind of a thrill, and arguably, long lasting.
Back on dry land we head to Tauranga where we park at the foot of the beautiful Mount Monganui, with its grazing sheep and rabbits and its view over the glittering, surf studded sea. I show it off proudly, as though I personally, had created it. We meet Roxi in the amazing Pizza Library which I love so much and as she enters, beaming, I remember again just how great she us, with a hint of sadness as I know we are leaving her home country now and that it will be some years before we or she will be venturing over to the other side of the world again.
We bid farewell as is customary, by saying, quite casually, that we will see each other 'later'.
"I will view the next few years as part of your trip back to Tauranga," says Roxi, "only you're going the long way."
And with that she is gone, having shared an all to swift beer and a pizza, home to nurse a burgeoning cold and to join Cal, whose cold has already burgeoned and has made him unable to venture out.
We suppress our sorrows the next day, with a trip to Hobbiton, the set of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies, depicting 'The Shire', a quiet, peaceful country village with little 'hobbit holes' cut out of the hillside, hobbit sized, where the hobbits make jam, grow potatoes, smoke fish, and generally go about their playful, peaceful existence. It is from this country eden, this harmonious, gentle, unassuming lifestyle, that Frodo and Samwise are snatched, in The Lord of the Rings, and from which, before them, in 'The Hobbit', Bilbo Baggins departed in his reluctant adventuring, and in accidental pursuit of The Ring.
“I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone." (said Gandalf)
"I should think so", (said Bilbo) "— in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
And I don't blame him. Hobbiton is beautiful. Helen in particular and I are captivated, half forgetting it's a movie set and isn't real. Its so beautiful. I can absolutely understand why the farmer whose land was hired to build on, didn't mind at all when they decided to leave it there. (Well that and the rather tidy profit he probably turns, but those kind of thoughts seem unnatural in Hobbiton.)
Small, coloured, circular doorways in blue, green and pink dot the hillside, each below a grassy mound, each about three quarters of a normal human height. Small washing lines are erected, on which blow small waistcoats, caps and trousers. Plants and vegetable patches, small real, some otherwise, abound, with small pitch forks and spades stuck into the ground beside them,as though the workers have simply paused for lunch.
One hobbit hole has a little table outside it selling homemade marmalade, another a smoking hole for fish. There is a maypole for parties, a tiny cart for horses, and a beautiful tree, a kind that doesn't occur in New Zealand in this climate, crafted out of many tiny fake leaves, wired onto its branches.
There is even a pub, the Green Dragon, where we can buy hobbity cider in hobbitty mugs. I am so willingly unable to tell fact from fiction that I am not sure whether the cat by the fire is real. Until it gets up and walks off.
It seems to me that life in Hobbiton would suit me, I love so much the lure of quiet and nature, of countryside and simplicity. And yet, like the hobbits I too have been drawn into an adventure, not always comfortable but always worth having, and after which, life will never be the same.
We bid a somewhat tearful farewell to Michael and Helen in the car park. They are going back to Hobbiton. We have an adventure to continue.
It feels, for a rather vertiginous moment, as we watch them depart, as though it simply won't be possible to travel to another country without them. They are friends of that rare and precious kind that demand nothing from you, and who, no matter what the situation, or how many months of absence, always feel perfectly natural, as though you were born with them in tow.
"Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Goodbye fellow adventurers.
See you in Hobbiton.
No comments:
Post a Comment