A PERFECT WALK.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 99, 28 April 1909, Page 10

A PERFECT WALK.

THE TANGARAKAU GORGE. MANGAROA TO WHANGAMOMONA. THE PASSING OF THE WILDERNESS. (From Our Special Reporter.) There are few perfect walks anywhere. The qualifications are so numerous, so genuinely exacting, that perfection is exceedingly rare. The writer knows of only two in New Zealand. One is the overland journey from Te Anau to Milford Sound — declared on the authority of connoisseurs of experience in many lands to be the finest in the world — and the other, of a totally different character, is the forty-mile walk between Mangaroa and Whangamomona through the Tangarakau Gorge. The Te Anau-Milford Sound trip is one of New Zealand's tourist assets. It is as well known and as much photographed almost as Rotorua itself. The track has been trodden by thousands of pilgrims in search of the picturesque ; it has been described — well, ill, or indifferently — a hundred times over ; its particular beauties in various aspects are a weekly adornment of the illustrated papers ; it is one of the brightest flowers in the collection of the Tourist Department ; yet it survives. It must indeed be a great walk. Nothing less could bear the burden of advertisement and adulation. THE OTHER : A CONTRAST. In strange contrast stands the other perfect walk — like a modest maiden of the bush beside a queen of the mountains. Both are beautiful, yet their beauty is not the same. There is not even the remotest resemolance. There you have the long levels of the Southern lake, the snow-capped peaks rooted in the dark-green bush, the high crest of the pass with the far view, then the waterfalls and the massive grandeur of the Sound. Here it is, the bush, richer than the Southern forest, and the river winding down a long narrow gorge with 3teep papa walls dripping*- with little cascades, a narro.w path and — nothing else. No sublime mountains, no wide expanse of water, no distant prospect, except in one place for a few seconds, no sentinelled arm of the sea — simply the bush. Yet in all the essentials of a perfect walk it is well-nigh matchless of its kind, and — it has escaped the übiquitous tourist. It is a flower blushing unseen in tho heart of the bush, far from railways, far from motor-cars, fat from the madding crowd. The approaches on either side are by coach over forty miles of rough roads. It is completely isolated, unknown to the tourist and undepicted in the weekly papers. Yet the roads are creeping into the charmed ground of this gem of the wilderness, and when the highway runs right through from Ongaruhe to Whangamomona it will no longer be a perfect walk. Still further from perfection will it bo when the railway follows the road. N Now what are these essential qualifications for a perfect walk? Some are negative. In the first place there must be no road. Roads were not made for the walker — a two-foot track would suflice him — but for all manner of vehicles, carts, carriages, coaches, motorcars, bullock-wagons and traction-en-gines. All these are a perpetual menace •to the quiet mind, without wh-ch no walk can be enjoyed to perfection. Then there is the dust of traffic in the dryf weather, mud in tho wet. And a road cuts such a swathe through the bush as to leave a hideous margin of dying, dead, or prostrate tTees on either side. A railway is even worse, and this fact detracts much from the beauty of many sections of the central Main Trunk. A footpath or a bridle track usually does little damage to the bush. A few trees go, of course, but where the cleft in the bush is so nai-row the damage is quickly •repaired. Eyesores in the shape of leafless skeletons, gaunt and grey, are very few and far between on a bush track. Add to a narrow, winding path the other essentials' of cliff, river, hill, dale, bush, the waterfall, the wayside glen, and the *ver-changing scene, and you have all the ingredients of a perfect walk. But the road must go. You may have a most enjoyable walk, a perfect drive in a motor-car, or a coach or other conveyance, but the pleasure of your walk will be marred, if you take it on the highway. NOT A NEW TRACK. The long thirty-mile bridge-track into, through and out of the Tangarakau Gorge is not fresh cut. It has been the regular route from Taranaki to the middle King Country for more than a dozen years The cuttings through th^ papa arc overgrown with moss, and the primitive bridges are beiDg replaced, so old are they and decrepit. In places it is even dangerous, where the track passes round a papa precipice, fifty feet above the river, on a ledge nanow to start with, and pow reduced to a, few inches by slipp. For miles and miles, •till one- loses all idta of time or distance, it iollows the banks of the dark river, a tributary of -the Wanganui, winding through * tunnels of verdant foliage, out again over strips of greensward, and up the bare white face of a cliff, bonneted with overhanging fern and shrubs, then down again and across the river on a log bridge, past tunnels and spouts of clearest water dropping in stages several hundred feet irom the tops of the- valley lulls, and so on and on, seemingly for ever. TRAMPING. To cover the thirty and odd miles between Mangaroa and the first accommodation house on the other side of the wilderness, Halktt's, about eight miles short of Whangamomona, it is well to start betimes. Be up before daybreak, get your own breakfast, cut your provisions for the journey in sandwiches — you will get nothing but water on the way — and ttike the track through the morning mists. It is perfect. You are all alone in the iorest with never a sound but the purling of the peaceful stream half hidden by the pines below, and the occasional notes of bush birds, the clear call of the tui, the screech of the kaka, and the rustle of the pigeon in its short flights from tree to tree. For hours you will never see a human being or hear a human voice. Then, pel haps, you will overtake a couple ot "swagger*" tramping, trudging, mechanically, bowed, under their burdens, and sweating with the heat, oblivious of beauty, of anything but the everlasting problem, where they are going to get the next feed, and where to spend the night. There are manj men on the roads in theae times looking for work. They trek from place to place, from the Main Trunk country over to the Stratford side of the bush, where there is employment on the railways and north and south, up side roads, in event of a job of bush-felling going a-begging. But times arc bud. The writer struck two separate parties, who confessed to being broke, stony broke. Three young fellows, sturdy travellers, had a florin between them, which they hoarded as a la;-t resource. They fclept on top of a haystack at Hallett's m a night of pouring rain. They were too proud to mention their impeenniosity, .Irnt Mr. Hallott, seeing them turning into the hay at 6 o'clock iv the evening, worm-

ed the truth out, and would have them in for tea. They were up and away long before breakfast. Their quest for work was obviously as genuine as their independence. It was not so with tome of the others. THE DESPOILER AT WORK. There is only one spofc on the whole way where you can get the long view. It is a few miles out of Mangaroa, where the track climbs to the top of a ridge between one valley and another. The mists were still thick, as it was qu\te early when the writer reached this stage of the journey. It was like a frozen sea, with dark-green islands running in ridges away to the horizon. The volcano of Tongariro stood up against the sun in the far distance like an inverted bucket. Ruapehu was faintly indicated through a film of cloud. The view was only momentary. With thirty miles to cover before nightfall, there was no time to waste on views. The track dipped into the bush, not to emerge again for' twenty odd miles. That score of miles was simply one long "gjeen thought in. a green shade." The road-makers and bridge-builders are at work opening up this island of bush to civilisation and spoiling the perfect walk. In short stretches the little track has been expanded into an ugly muddy road. The cp-operative labourers' tents cluster round these, centres of industry. In some cases the workmen have wives and families with them. Further on the dark Tangarakau is bridged by low log structures only a few feet above the water level, and liable in flood time to bo covered. Substantial bridges are being built alongside from logs cut and shaped from trees in the bush. Aerial ropu-v&yt> run from side t& side of the gorge. All these are preparations to connect the loose ends of fche roads running into the bush from Mangaroa and Whangamomona. There are about twenty miles of road still to be made. The work will take a couple of years probably, and by that time the troubles of the settlers already in the bush will be over, (freights will come down to reasonable prices, and flour and produce will be cheap, and the piano will supersede the phonograph. Settlement will' be spread on either side of the Gorge, .which- itself is reserved bj the merciful providence of the Scenic Commission. The whole district will flourish over the fallen bush, but the perfect walk will be gone for ever.