Our drive to Wellington (our last destination in this trip) would have only taken about an hour so we were looking for ways to fill in some time.
Just up the road from our two-night stay at Martinborough is the town of Featherstone. It houses a museum for the Fell Locomotives (a type of cog railway engine) that were once used to haul trains over the rugged Remutaka Mountain range between Upper Hutt and the Wairarapa Region. The railway line was eventually re-routed through an 8km long tunnel and the tired old locomotives were retired.
We stopped at the museum only to find that it is only open on weekends. I thought that I might be able to have snagged a photo through a window but the cunning buggers had covered the windows in a reflective coating.
However, just behind the railway museum was a little military museum. Featherstone Camp was New Zealand’s largest training camp during the First World War. Around 60,000 young men trained for military service on European battlefields between 1916 and 1918. At its peak, this camp could sleep and feed more than 9000 men, and train them to be infantrymen, artillerymen, mounted riflemen, and machine gunners. The government used the camp as a German prisoner of war camp and military hospital in 1918-19, and as a storage facility from 1919-26.
The camp re-opened in 1942 to hold 800 Japanese POWs captured at Guadalcanal. In early 1943, a group of recently arrived prisoners refused to work and staged a sit-down strike. A guard fired a warning shot which may have wounded ther ranmking commander, Lieutenant Commander Toshio Adachi. When the prisoners rose to their feet, the guards opened fire killing 48 prisoners. This event was a result of cross-cultural misunderstanding. Wartime censors concealed details of the tragedy due to fears of Japanese reprisals against Allied POWs. This event is perhaps NZ’s version of the breakout that we saw in Australia at Cowra.
From Featherstone, we crossed the steep Remutaka Range which runs north-east to south-west for 55 kilometres from the upper reaches of the Hutt Valley. Narrow and winding, State Highway 2 crosses the range from Featherstone to the Hutt Valley at an impressively high saddle. At the road’s summit is a lookout point where we couldn’t stop as it was on a tight curve and on the wrong side of the highway.
To fill in some time, we did a deviation to Turakirae Head where there is a scientific reserve, This coastal site features a massive, easily accessible NZ fur seal colony and a globally significant, 7,000-year record of five successive earthquake-raised beach ridges, including one 6.4 meter uplift from the 1855, 6.4 magnitude quake.
On the next head, we cold see the Baring Head Lighthouse. It is a concrete structure that was built to be the main approach light to Wellington Harbour, as well as a coastal light for Cook Strait.
Before reaching Wellington, we stopped at Days Bay – a popular seaside village on the eastern edge of Wellington Harbour. The wharf, an historic timber structure was built in 1895, it serves as the entry point for East by West ferries across the harbour and is a popular spot for fishing.
We finally reached our hotel in Wellington ay 3.30 pm, quite happy with the way that had filled in the day.
The completion of another great trip.
Look forward to seeing you on 5/3/26 at the RSL.