Land of Do-As-You-Please Adventure

Land of Do-As-You-Please Adventure is the children’s most openly recreational visit among the shifting lands above The Faraway Tree. The excursion transforms the cloud-top world into a gigantic playground of roundabouts, trains, aeroplanes, elephants, and a sunlit sea, giving the children and their friends a concentrated experience of freedom and delight. Yet the land’s appeal is inseparable from its danger: because the lands move away from the top of The Faraway Tree, the visitors must eventually abandon even the most enjoyable landscape and find their way home.

Entry into a Playful World

The visit begins when the children decide to climb through the cloud rather than remain below. Their passage follows the established route of adventure: they cross the ditch between the lane and the wood, enter the Enchanted Wood, climb the upper branches of The Faraway Tree, and pass through the final branch and its little ladder into the cloud-top region. The vertical route turns an ordinary holiday into a threshold experience. The ditch separates homeward roads from the wood; the tree provides the ascent; the cloud opening marks the transition into a world whose ordinary limits no longer apply.

The land initially appears to be an enormous amusement park. Although a lantern hangs above the hole to illuminate the climb, daylight fills the country as soon as the group emerges above the cloud. The sudden change from an underground-looking entrance to open daytime emphasizes the land’s playful unreality. Roundabouts revolve to music, swings and see-saws invite immediate participation, a railway train moves busily through the country, and small aeroplanes pass overhead carrying Brownies, Pixies, and Goblins. Unlike the threatening order of Land of Topsy-Turvy Adventure, where houses, trees, and people must all remain upside-down, this place is introduced through motion, color, and apparent abundance.

Rides, Motion, and Collective Delight

The children quickly reunite with Moon-Face and Silky, who are already riding a roundabout. Silky travels on a tiger that rises and falls, while Moon-Face rides a giraffe. When the roundabout stops, Bessie chooses a white rabbit, Fanny mounts a lion, Jo chooses a bear, and Dick selects a horse. The distribution of animals turns the ride into a shared performance: each rider has an individual mount, but all are carried together by the same circular machine.

The children respond with uninhibited excitement, and the roundabout’s repeated rotation intensifies that feeling. Jo proposes six rides without getting off, and the group accepts the challenge. By the end, the speed has made them so dizzy that they roll about like sailors. The scene treats pleasure as both sensory and social. The ride is not merely an attraction observed from a distance; it produces bodily disorientation, laughter, and a common memory shared by children and the two residents of The Faraway Tree.

The railway extends this fascination with motion into an experiment in control. Dick climbs onto the engine, while the girls, Moon-Face, and Silky take the carriage immediately behind. The guard signals with a green flag and blows his whistle, and Jo twists the starting wheel to set the train moving. He is delighted to drive it, fulfilling an interest he has long held, but the experience soon exposes the difference between freedom and mastery. The engine goes too fast, so Jo pulls the “Go Slow” handle; then his attention to the machinery prevents him from noticing a station until the train has shot past it. Passengers waiting on the platform look angry, and travelers inside the train call for him to stop. The attraction therefore remains playful, but it also converts childish enthusiasm into a practical responsibility affecting strangers.

Elephants, the Sea, and Expanding Horizons

After the railway, six large grey elephants approach the group. Each has a rope ladder on its left side, allowing the children, Moon-Face, and Silky to climb onto a comfortable seat on its back. The elephants sway through the crowds, giving the riders a high, moving vantage point. Fanny is especially pleased because the elephants fulfill her idea of having everyone ride one. Her excitement also draws attention to the novelty of the experience for Moon-Face, who has never even seen an elephant before.

The elephant ride contains a small but revealing mishap. Moon-Face’s rope ladder slips from his elephant, leaving him unable to climb down and making him fear that he will have to ride the animal for the rest of his life. The incident shows how quickly an attraction can become a problem when its means of access disappears. The group’s pleasure is thus never entirely detached from practical vulnerability: height, movement, and unfamiliar creatures create risks even in a land designed for amusement.

A signpost marked “TO THE SEA” redirects the adventure toward an entirely different kind of attraction. After following it around two corners, the group reaches a blue sea under warm sunshine, with golden sands extending toward the small waves. Dick immediately removes his shoes and socks, and soon everyone is paddling. Moon-Face and Silky have never paddled before, but they enjoy it as much as the children do, while Dick ventures far enough into the water to soak his shorts. The scene broadens the meaning of the land’s freedom. Its pleasures are not confined to mechanical rides; the visitors can also explore an open natural space, improvise their own play, and share an experience previously unknown to their companions.

Boundaries, Departure, and Return

The land’s freedom is limited by the movement of the world itself. Silky warns that it will soon move away from The Faraway Tree, and the group must return even though the country is one of the nicest lands they have encountered. Jo accepts the necessity without treating departure as a defeat. He remembers that his parents could not possibly manage without the children and calls Dick in from the water. The appeal of home becomes the decisive counterweight to the appeal of the amusement land.

Dick returns at once, with dripping shorts and a splashed jersey, so that no one is left behind. The whole group then makes its way to the hole leading down through the cloud. Jo looks back longingly at the cheerful land, acknowledging that the pleasures of the adventure are genuine even though they cannot last. This backward glance gives the departure emotional weight: returning home is necessary, but it does not erase the attraction of the place they are leaving.

The descent restores the familiar social world. The group crowds into Moon-Face’s room, tired after the day’s activities, and Moon-Face advises them not to fall asleep before reaching home, suggesting that they take cushions for the ride. Their return through the tree and down The Slippery-Slip completes the passage from household permission to magical excursion and back again. Later, when the children leave Land of Presents, they again descend to The Faraway Tree, sit carefully with their gifts on their knees, and shoot down The Slippery-Slip and out of the front door. Across these returns, the vertical routes function as more than transport: they repeatedly close the boundary between extraordinary play and ordinary family life.

Narrative Significance

Land of Do-As-You-Please Adventure presents freedom as an active, communal practice rather than as the absence of all limits. The children choose rides, operate machinery, follow a sign to the sea, and respond to small accidents through collective movement. Their choices generate both pleasure and trouble, especially when Jo drives the train too fast or when Moon-Face loses his rope ladder. The land allows agency, but its attractions make consequences visible.

The episode also depends on contrast. In Land of Topsy-Turvy Adventure, a policeman insists that every person must obey a rigid upside-down rule; in Land of Dreams, the Sandman’s handful of sand threatens to immobilize the visitors in sleep; in Land of Presents, objects can be taken only for other people, not selfishly for oneself. Here the governing impression is permissiveness, but even this permissiveness has boundaries established by the land’s motion, the safety of the group, and the obligation to return to the family. The adventure’s lasting pattern is therefore not escape from order but a temporary expansion of possibility inside a larger cycle of departure, exploration, and reintegration.