A ROAD IN WESTLAND

Hokitika Guardian, 13 May 1929, Page 3

A ROAD IN WESTLAND

.(My ELSIE K. MORTON, in the “ Auckland Herald.”) J)cwn the gorge and through the valley over floods that fret and foam As they rush among the boulders, hastening to their ocean home. Now the matchless forests/ open all their brightness on the scene, And the gladdened eye is feasting on a hundred tints of green. It must surely have been of a road iu Westland that the poet was singing

when lie penned that lilting verse! And when one speaks of a road in Westland, one thinks not of the byways, but of the Main South Road that runs over a hundred miles from Hokitika to Woheka, and the Fox Glacier Hotel, seventeen miles south of Franz Josef. From Weheka the road runs down to Cook River Flat, the present limit for motor traffic, 'then it rambles on over river beds, through dark forests, through fertile farming country, and away to the farthest hinterland of South Westland. Some day all that magnificent route will he open to motor traffic, and when it is it will draw tourists from all parts of the world. For here is wayside beauty and grandeur unique even in a country that is one of the fairest on earth. One thinks of a national highway as a road rather more than usually interesting i+s main characteristic utility rather than beauty, which generally belongs to the little roads that wander off the beaten track. This road in Westland is unique. It is, without question, the most beautiful in ail New Zealand. HeVe is a national highway that might well inspire the greatest road-song ever written ; a road of adventure and romance, winding through old-time mining towns of the Golden Age, through green aisles of virgin forest, up and down precipitous mountain slopes across swift-rushing rivers, a road that «• •-irf•; tli<> shores of lovely lakes, and brushes the foot of shining glaciers and snow-crowned mountain gods. From Hokitika, we got our first glimpse of the Southern Alps, sweeping up, a hundred miles away, in curving snow-crested barrier from the rim of the ocean. Supremo over all that rampart oif glittering peaks rose Mount Cook, not the delicately tapering peak one sees from closer viewpoints, but a vast, high-piled mass like a great icebore floating in a sea of crystal blue. With the whitewall of the mountains still before us, we sped swiftly down the road, the ocean, darkly blue, stretching far away into the west. . . Soon we were in Ross, twenty miles from Hokitika, and last railway station on the West Coast. A striking feature of the landscape out beyond Ross was a mighty headland, appropriately named Bold Head, with white lines of s”rf pencilled in the wide expanse of blue. Then our road came in from the sea, crossed the Mikonui and carried Us into the heart of Ferguson’s Bush, the Hongi’s Track of Westland. But even Auckland’s far-famed Hongi’s Track becomes ordinary by comparison with that, wonderful drive through Fergusons. where the road passes through miles of towering rimu and kahikatea, their massive trunks clothed from base* to crown with kie-kie, so amazingly luxuriant that the great trees are transformed into columns of cascading greenery, beneath which not a vestige of the trunk itself may he seen. Sometimes the kie-kie gives place to a more delicate and exouisite canopy, the green lace of the hymcnophyllum, crepe fern, and the transparent beauty oif Whole gardens of kidney ferns, in drr.ping branches und trunk in a gar-j

ment more lovely than any woven by the hand of man. \ At mid-day wc came to Harihari, the only settlment of any size' between Boss and Wailio. Lying in a wide sj'ip of open country beneath the circling hills, with the sun streaming down on its wayside homes, post-office, school, and bowser pump beside the hotel, JJarihari seemed as peaceful and prosperous a hamlet as one might find in all Westland. In the rich pasturage of wide fields, herds of cattle and sheep were grazing, and from the,great kahikatea trees standing besides the road came the fluting and calling of bellbilds. Seven motor-cars drew up outside the hotel, parties of tourists strolled down the road after lunch, but the bel I birds cared not at all—they merely sang a little louder, hopped down a little closer, showing off before the company. Soon after leaving Harihari we wore making the ascent of Mount Hercules, a densely-wooded hill rising about 1200 ft. from the level country. If Ferguson’s had been a revelation of beauty how shall one find words to describe this wonderful mountain road? Yet

no comparison need be made, for the j charm of Ferguson’s lay in the long green aisles, the toworing trees rising ■ bom the side of the road, while Mount Hercules gave us far-reaching panoramas of mountain and valley beyond, ‘ closer glimpses of walls of ferns, golden-brown pools beneath the banks which caught and held in minutest perfection the reflection oif drooping ferns, the thrill of sudden steep descents, the swing of hairpin bends. Then the long straight road once more, little Tetaho, a few homes and post office on the rim of the hush beneath the mist-shrouded hills, Mint Creek coming down from the heights, with fragrant wild mint a foot high beside its clear pools,' Past Forks, where the road, branches off to Okarito on the coast, and then . .down ( through the forest beside Lake Mapourka, all grey and silver, gleaming through the ferns. I mid then the final vision of beauty, a turn in the road, and there, above the distant forests of Waiho Gorge, the great white stairway of Franz Josef Glacier, descending between snowcrested mountain walls, Nature’s final ~ masterpiece in that gallery of matchless road-pictures of South Westlandi