Our First Day of Touring in NZ

Yesterday was a grey day with drizzle, interspersed with frequent heavy showers and very occasional patches of blue in the sky.

There aren’t a great number of interesting sights in Palmerston North but before leaving, we scouted out the extensive, and quite beautiful, parklands and the city square with its tall clocktower.

In the mid-19th century, Palmerston North was settled by Europeans—mostly by Scandinavians and, later, British settlers. It was named Palmerston in honour of Viscount Palmerston, a former British Prime Minister. The suffix North was added in 1871 to distinguish the settlement from Palmerston in the South Island. This  city is considered to be the “student city” of New Zealand’s North Island. as it has three tertiary institutions. and a large proportion of its population consists of students attending them.

Our plan was to travel to Stratford, near Mount Taranaki (previously called Mount Egmont). It was only a short distance of around 230 kms (2 1/2 hours) so we decided on a much longer deviation through the more central area of the Island. This took us past a tiny village of Horopito here I had once spent a deligtful weekend with some folks from Control Data where I worked in the 1980s.

The first town that we came to was called Bulls. Its pretty much a non-descript farming town but it successfully markets itself with puns on its name. For example, “New Zealand gets its milk from Bulls” or the sign for the local police station “Const-a-bull” and the local cafe is “Unbelievabull”

On the northern part of our route we came across the little town of Mangaweka with its historic old street.. The town was surveyed to support the expansion of the North Island Main Trunk Railway Line along with roads in the area during the late 19th-century. By 1894 the settlement had a post office, hall, and school. By the turn of the century the populated had reached close to 1,000. The main highway was re-located in the early 1980s, leaving the former main street like a museum My first impression was that it could have been used as a set for a John Wayne Movie. Most of the town is now on the other side of the highway.

Mangaweka is now an active base for rafting, kayaking, river swimming and camping on the nearby river.

After reaching Waioura (home of NZ’s largest military base) we turmed east towards Ohakune and Horopito. Our next interesting find was a memorial to a 1953 railway disaster.

The distaster occured on Christmas Eve 1953 when a naturally formed dam on Mt Ruapehu (an active volcano) collapsed sending lava, mud and ice down the Whangaehu River valley. THis flash flood destoyed both the rail and road bridges that crossed it. The Wellington–Auckland night express plunged into the flooded river and of the 285 passengers and crew on board, 151 died. The volcano at Mount Ruapehu was not erupting at the time. The disaster remains New Zealand’s worst rail accident.

The North Island’s topography (especially in the centre of the island) is quite diffferent from that of the South Island. The rugged mountains of the south are caused by subduction – where one of the earth’s tectonic plates is pushed below another. This causes upheaval and the creation of rugged mountain ranges. In the North, the landscape is mostly a result of volcanism with (apart from the three volcanoes themselves) rolling hills and deep river valleys caused by eruptions and lava flows.

The town of Ohakune was pretty much our turning point to head south down the Mangawhero River Valley. It’s a rural service town on the southern end of Tongariro National Park and close to the southwestern slopes of the active volcano Mount Ruapehu, The architecture of the buildings in the main steet have an alpine flavour because the town is a popular base in winter for skiers using the ski fields of Mount Ruapehu and in summer for trampers (hikers) walking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing.

Ohakune is also famous for its giant carrot sculpture on the main road into the town. Carrots were introduced here in the 1920s by Chinese settlers, who cleared the land by hand and explosives. Ohakune now grows two-thirds of the North Island’s total crop.The adventure playground by the river is a superb play area for children.

The Mangawhero River drains the south-western slopes of Mount Ruapehu, passes through Ohakune before discharging into the Whangaehu River to the south-west of Mangamahu. The river was used as a filming location for the 2002 movie The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. There is some wonderful scenery along the way although hardly a straight stretch of road.

Along the way, I found my ideal job, if ever I come back reincarnated I want to be a New Zealand Stop and Go Man! This guy is well set up. He can sit on his chair all day and doesn’t even have to hold his stop / go sign. Of course, it is within easy reach – he just has to twist it around to stop and start the traffic through the road works. In addition, he has his chilly bin (or chully bun, depending on the strength of his Kiwi eccint) to keep his sandwhiches and drinks cold. A great working life!

We also came across an iconic New Zealnd sight – a flock of hundreds of sheep being driven along the road to a new pasture. Fortunately, we came across them at the end of some other roadwork and we were already going very slowly. We could do nothing else but come to a halt until they had passed.

The road flattened out as we came near to Whanganui where we turned west towards Mount Taranaki. Whanganui is located on the west coast of the North Island at the mouth of the Whanganui River. We saw many fields of maize and sunflowers along the way.

We reached our destination at Stratford just before 5.00pm. It had been a long day but packed with scenery. Stratford lies beneath the eastern slopes of Mount Taranaki which isn’t even remotely visible because of the low cloud and rain.

The town has a population of 6,400 and has New Zealand’s only glockenspiel clock tower plays the music from the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet three times a day. The Stratford Shakespeare Festival takes place in various venues across the city in April each year.