AT GOLLUM'S POOL: TAWHAI FALLS

We left Auckland before dawn, the city still half-asleep, its motorways humming like a giant beast dreaming of movement. The bus pushed south through the Waikato plains, past fields stitched together by mist and early light. For the students, it was just another school trip; for me, standing at the front as a teacher with my first school, it felt like crossing a threshold—responsibility mixed with anticipation, authority balanced by wonder.

Dawn followed us like a slow revelation. The sky paled, then blushed, then opened fully, as if the land itself were inhaling. In Māori thought, journeys begin long before the feet move; intention travels ahead of the body. One does not simply go somewhere—one enters into a relationship. Somewhere in that widening light, the road ceased to be asphalt and became a line of passage, a tacit request for permission.

By the time Tongariro National Park rose on the horizon, the landscape had changed its language. The air sharpened. Volcanic silhouettes—Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe, Tongariro—stood like ancient sentinels, carved from fire and time. In Māori cosmology, these were not inert mountains but beings with genealogy, bound by whakapapa to sky and earth, to Ranginui and Papatūānuku. They stood not above the land, but as the land—elders of stone whose authority came from endurance. Somewhere among them waited Tāwhai Falls, modest in height (barely 13 metres), yet vast in presence. In te ao Māori, scale does not determine mana (power, prestige, strength). Presence does.

The walk in was short—20 minutes, no more—but it felt ceremonial. The track wound through beech forest, roots twisting like the knuckles of old guardians gripping the soil. Ferns crowded the path, damp and luminous, brushing against boots like curious spirits. Every step seemed to echo a quieter rule: walk gently, speak softly, listen first. The forest was not empty—it was attentive. The whenua (country in te ao Māori) was awake.

The sound came before the sight: water murmuring, then whispering, then speaking clearly in a cold, silver voice. Water (wai in te ao Māori) carries mauri (the core in te ao Māori)—the life force that binds all things. It remembers descent, carrying stories from mountain to river to sea, never losing its origin.

And there it was. Tāwhai Falls, spilling over dark basalt in a smooth, white ribbon, plunging into a pool so clear and still it seemed unreal. This was Gollum’s Pool, where the creature once crouched, half-shadow, half-reflection—where obsession clung tighter than skin. Yet stripped of cinema, the place felt older than any story told on screen.

A natural amphitheatre. A threshold pool. In another register of thought, this was a place of tapu (sacred, forbidden in te ao Māori)—a meeting point between realms, where one pauses rather than enters without thought.

The students knew it instantly. Their chatter dropped, replaced by that rare school-trip silence: awe. Not the loud awe of excitement, but the quieter kind—recognition without explanation. A sense that this was not merely a place to see, but a place that sees back.

The water below was icy—fed by mountain snowmelt, barely above single-digit temperatures—yet irresistibly alive. Sunlight fractured on the surface, turning the pool into broken glass and liquid emerald. The cliff walls rose like pages of geological history, layers of volcanic ash and lava stacked by centuries of eruption and collapse. Time here was vertical, not linear. The past was not behind us—it surrounded us.

Standing there, I watched my students spread out—some taking photos, some testing the water with cautious toes, others simply staring. In that moment, teaching escaped the classroom entirely. History, myth, literature, geography—they braided themselves together effortlessly.

Tolkien’s and Jackson's imagined Middle-earth and Aotearoa’s very real, very ancient land overlapped perfectly, as if fiction had merely been listening closely and taking notes from a much older teacher.

I felt it then: the quiet weight of leadership. Being responsible not just for safety and schedules, but for moments like this—moments that lodge themselves in memory and refuse to leave. In Māori terms, this was ako (learning in te ao Māori) in its truest form: teaching and learning flowing both ways. A school trip measured not in kilometres (over 350 km round trip) or hours, but in imprint—in the way a place reshapes those who enter it with care.

When we finally turned back, the forest seemed to close behind us, keeping its secrets. The falls faded to a distant murmur, but the sense of having been received—briefly, conditionally—remained. Tāwhai Falls had done what it does best: small in scale, immense in spirit, reminding us that some landscapes do not need to be conquered, named, or explained. They only need to be approached with humility.