Once a year Thailand loses it's collective mind. Songkran is the celebration of the Thai New Year, and has become a week-long, drunken melee. The beautiful tradition of pouring water over one's elders in a cleansing, blessing ceremony has morphed into dangerous water fights, with people being blasted off their motorbikes by powerful water cannons. This year over four-hundred people were killed over the "seven dangerous days," mostly from road accidents. Nearly all businesses close for at least part of the week. It is a very good time to get out of town.
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| The Songkran celebration was already beginning at the airport in Bangkok |
It is also the hottest time of the year here, so we opted to go somewhere where we could escape the heat without leaving this hemisphere. With a short layover in Sydney, we were transported "over the rainbow" to a stunningly beautiful country where autumn was in full swing.
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| Tim enjoyed a cup of Holy Goat coffee in the Sydney airport |
New Zealand Self-Drive Tours is the excellent company that arranged everything for us - our rental car, hotel reservations, tours, ferry transport between the two islands...everything. We were picked up from the airport by "Uncle" in Auckland and driven to our first hotel, the Sofitel, which was located right on the harbor. After a much-needed nap, it was a short walk to our first event, a Harbour Dinner Cruise. We arrived quite early, so we stopped in at a cafe nearby, Degrees, and got our first look at just how expensive things were here. A nice change of pace, however, was the potable tap water brought to the table. Never happens in Thailand...At six p.m., we boarded the 49-foot Defiance, a lovely sailing yacht with a 22-meter mast, built in 1987. It's weathered captain and two young french deckhands welcomed sixteen passengers aboard - two Americans (us), and all the rest Kiwis, as New Zealanders call themselves. The water was calm as we sailed out into the harbor, and we watched the city lights awaken under a cloudy sunset. We enjoyed our dinner on deck while all the others went below to eat.
The captain was a wealth of local knowledge. New Zealand has a population of 4.5 million, with 1.4 million in Auckland alone. By contrast, the city of Bangkok has 8 million people! New Zealand is a British colony, one of the last lands in the world to be settled by humans. The Maori came to the islands only 800 years ago, with the first Europeans arriving in the 1800s. This volcanic island nation has mainly Polynesian, British and French influences.
Our captain pointed out the constellation of the Southern Cross when it peeked through the clouds for a bit, then steered the vessel back to port, giving his guests a turn at the wheel. On the way back, he pointed out the visible mast of the largest single-masted yacht in the world, the Mirabella, in dry dock here for maintenance. The evening provided a lovely introduction to a lovely country.In the morning, we expected a rental car to be delivered. We were just finishing our breakfast when I wandered out to see if it had arrived, but instead a driver was waiting to transport us to the rental place. I found him about four minutes past the arranged time, and he said they are only supposed to wait five minutes. Tim gulped down a last sip of coffee and we were whisked away to the Europcar office. We were presented with a Holden Trax, apparently a GM-affiliate (don't tell anyone,) and a GPS.
With Tim behind the wheel on the right side of the car, we headed out into the left-sided traffic. It soon became clear that our hotel was not listed on the GPS by name, and due to our abrupt departure from the hotel, we didn't have any of other info with us. So a drive that should have taken ten minutes turned into a forty-five minute frustration of dead-ends, no-right-turns and streets closed off for construction. By the time we made it back, we had to hightail it out of there to make our next arranged event in time.
Luckily, with only 4.5 million people, traffic was not an issue. The cityscape soon gave way to twisty, rolling hills dotted with sheep and cows. We drove quickly to arrive in time for our 1 p.m. tour of Hobbiton in Matamata. In the middle of farm country, we came upon a small building with a parking lot full of cars and lots of big, green tour buses. Guess we weren't the only ones who wanted to see the famous movie set.
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| New Zealand dollars. But still, over fifty bucks... |
The set is situated on twelve acres of an immense, 1250-acre private sheep and beef farm, reachable only via the Hobbiton tour buses. The New Zealand army was brought in to build the road into the set in 1999, and they were sworn to secrecy. But the soldiers drank in the local pubs in the evening, and soon the secret was out.
The first set created here for the Lord of the Rings trilogy was temporary, facades that were mostly destroyed by a huge storm. When Peter Jackson approached the owner to recreate the set for the Hobbit movies, the owner wisely stipulated that the set must be made permanent. Hence, the little Hobbit village stands just as it did in the movies.
Even if one wasn't a Tolkien fan, you couldn't help but appreciate the quaint beauty of the place. But many JRRT fans strolled the grounds, reenacting scenes and quoting lines. Our tour guide, Rene, was actually a fan who moved here from Ft. Collins, CO to work as a guide for six months. Our tour group of fifteen or twenty included nine middle-aged American women who appeared to have traveled together specifically to see this place. We also met a young Spaniard who, on his way back from New York, decided to "stop off" in New Zealand. He was planning to start re-watching the trilogy that evening. We also had a young Japanese couple whose little boy went crazy for all the kid-sized stuff. Fascinating to see the universal appeal of these brilliant fantasies.
Our guide shared many stories of Peter Jackson's meticulous attention to detail. One tree's leaves had the wrong shade of green, so he ordered the over 200,000 offending leaves to be painted by hand. The local sheep were "too fluffy and white," so he brought in sheep with black faces and legs. One line in the book mentioned Hobbits sitting under a plum tree. He couldn't find a plum tree of the proper size, so he had an apple and pear tree brought in and made them look like plum trees, visible for all of two seconds in the movie. Only one tree on the set is fake - the huge tree that sits above Bag End.
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| Fake tree at the top of the hill |
Hobbiton has forty-one hobbit holes of various sizes to make actors look bigger or smaller as needed. Bag End has twenty-two rooms in the book, and the number of windows on the side of the hill imply this enormity, even though none of the hobbit holes have real interiors. The real gardens and minute details at each hole make it easy for visitors to suspend disbelief and lose themselves in this charming fantasy world.
At the end of the tour, we enjoyed an ale at the Green Dragon, the only full-sized building on site, constructed for the enjoyment of the tourists in 2012. The special brew is available exclusively to visitors of the Green Dragon - alas, it didn't "come in pints."
Back on the road, we stopped at a little roadside market for water and snacks, with a friendly "Cheers" from the proprietor. We arrived late afternoon at the Novatel Rotorua, and waited in the lobby while they straightened out a mix-up with our reservations. Once we were checked in, we walked out for dinner, this time at the Fat Dog Cafe. Pulled out the Chinese checkers and waited for our pricey food, which was pretty average. A couple of intoxicated locals made sure our walk back to the hotel wasn't too boring.
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| A view of Lake Roturua from our hotel room |
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| Nightlife in Rotorua |
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