July 25th to 27th - A Wizard Is Never Late

We set off on the Southern Motorway from Auckland just as I had so many weeks before only this time we drove past the turnoff to the Coromandel Peninsula and into the interior where we made for the town of Paeroa. The sole purpose of our stop there was so that we could get a bottle of their famous soft drink, L & P direct from the source. The ‘L’ stands for lemon and the ‘P’ stands for, you guessed it, Paeroa. It came into existence after the discovery of a clear spring running right underneath the town center and some bloke getting the idea to ruin perfectly clean water by saturating it with sugar, over 60 grams of sugar per bottle to be exact. Regardless of its nutritional properties, L &P is like Sprite’s larger, angrier and tastier brother. Each small town in New Zealand seems to have erected a giant statue of some food item by their welcome sign and I wouldn’t be surprised if the giant L & P bottle on the main street of Paeroa was the catalyst for that ritual. With excessive amounts of sugar flowing through our systems we made for Matamata. What was once an average sized farming town of a few thousand people has turned into somewhat of a tourist hotspot for one simple reason; The Lord of the Rings. A few kilometers up the road is the farm which was transformed into Hobbiton for the first and last films in the trilogy and it seems everyone in town has seized the golden opportunity to cash in on the namesake. While perusing the main street looking for a loaf of bread we found a place called Hobbit Sushi, it was shameful. Equally as shameful is the price we paid to take the official tour of the movie set but I won’t get into figures here. A brave few of us hopped onto their bus which they’d named Gandalf and took off down the road. We’d been forced to sign a confidentiality agreement with respect to any pictures or video we took and I plan to respect their wishes because after meeting the tour guide we found out that he and 20 other people would be out of work if their secrecy was compromised and I can’t have that on my conscience. The tour inexplicably began with a sheep shearing demonstration; it was something to just kill time while the previous tour group was picked up but it was still rather impressive and you’d have to have a heart of stone to not be happy bottle feeding a baby lamb. Once we entered the active set the tour guide asked as all sorts of trivia questions and everyone pretended not to know the answers (though we obviously all did but were too embarrassed to admit the extent of our love for Tolkien). It worked out fine though, the tour guide got to feel good about being knowledgeable and we got to keep our dignity. It was definitely surreal to see some of those places from the films in reality, the amount of detail the production team went into to give the place an aged look is nothing short of astounding. We heard stories about crazy Tolkien fanatics who could recite pieces of the story from memory and would put the set under intense scrutiny. We also heard tales about the lengths Peter Jackson went for authenticity like spending tens of thousands of dollars on a tree mentioned in one line of the book that got maybe a few seconds of screen time. I don’t regret for one second spending all that money on the tour, it was magical. I didn’t think it possible but I’m now even more excited to see the Hobbit films as I’ve seen firsthand the effort that’s going into making them amazing. After the tour we decided to push onto Tauranga where we would make camp at the base of Mount Maunganui such that we could climb it first thing in the morning. It was only 6:30 or so when we arrived but had been pitch black for almost an hour. I was aware of the effect this would have on Jaclyn as she couldn’t see the ocean only 20 meters away and couldn’t see the hulking behemoth that is Mount Maunganui right outside our doors. I’d never stayed in a holiday park before and I’ve certainly been missing out. For the equivalent of about $13 Canadian we got a little plot of land right on the first bits of grass touching the beach where we had access to electricity and all the amenities of a good hostel. We cooked a well-deserved dinner in the kitchen before rearranging our spaceship into sleep mode. This thing is cooler than cool; we were warm and cozy in our roomy back area, hot water bottles under our feet, tea in our hands with a DVD player showing The Fellowship of the Ring and a portable heater plugged into the provided power source. The best of part of all was we got to wake up to the sunrise over the beach. The morning’s hike was something we didn’t do the last time I was here and it’s a shame because the views over the Bay of Plenty are stunning as my photos will attest to. The hike was a difficult one but we celebrated by finishing off the last of our Lemon & Paeroa while I played guitar on some rocks on the beach. We spent the rest of the day driving to the east coast city of Gisborne where we sit now, preparing lists of food items for our big walk tomorrow. We will be tramping over 4 days and 3 nights around Lake Waikeramoana, one of the government sponsored ‘Great Walks of New Zealand’. Once that epic journey is complete we have promised ourselves burgers and a hostel in Napier to celebrate before roughing it in the central North Island. We will be out in the wilderness for a while without access to the World Wide Web but I will surely update everyone as soon as we make it back to civilization.