JOURNEY TO TARANAKI, Page 110.

Maori Messenger : Te Karere Maori, Volume I, Issue 3, 1 March 1855, Page 36

JOURNEY TO TARANAKI, Page 110.

Travelling through a New Zealand forest is certainly most dull and uninteresting to any one, except a botanist. It is true that nothing can be more beautiful to view than one of our woods, and its noble trees and everlasting foliage of every conceiveable shade of green, nor can anything be more melodious than the morning song of & the thousands of birds, the sweetness of whose voices has been universally extolled. But then when the traveller is in the midst of a dense wood all the beautiful foliage which looks so magnificent when seen from the outside is hi 2 h above hi* head, his view is limited to the trunks of the trees, covered with innumerable species of mosses and endless varieties of ferns, very interesting to a botanist, but not at all attractive to the casual observer: the everlasting supple-jack, that bane of travellers: and a few pale, sickly-looking bushes of underwood which gradually disappear as he penetrates farther into the depths of the forest. lhen as to the birds, they are never heard save in tlie skirts of the wood, and the only sound of life

that meets the traveller's ear, to break the dull monotonous silence of tlie forest after he has left the open country a mile or two "behind him, is the whistling sound produced by the flight of a stray pigeon, the occasional scream of a solitary kaka, or, now and then, the subdued and (as it might almost be called) whispering chatter of a pair of the pretty little green parrots called hahariki, or powliaitere, by the natives \ but a singing bird is a thing not to be thought of beyond the very outskirts of the wood. Sunshine never enters there, save in the shape of a few fugitive beams which now and then struggle through the dense mass of foliage overhead, and the consequence is that you are in perpetual twilight from sunrise to sunset; but this is not the only inconvenience arising from the want of a fair share of the genial warmth of the sun, for the atmosphere has ever a damp and chilling feeling and the ground is perpetually moist and sloppy underfoot, even in the driest weather. Then you are sure to be inconvenienced for want of water, and that seriously too in some cases, because the road has always to be kept upon a ridge wherever practicable, on account of that eternal kareao, which grows so luxuriantly and interlaces itself so ingeniously into an impenetrable mat in all the valleys,that those are carefully avoided as much as posssible, in laying out their lines of road, by the natives who, it must be allowed, have a very tolerable natural talent for engineering at which they would soon become pretty expert could the idea once be instilled into their minds that a straight road (where the lie of the country will admit of its being made straight) is the shortest and therefore the most eligible line for a man to take who wishes to travel from one given point to another. But this is an idea which is only just beginning to dawn upon the minds of the Maories by seeing the truth of the axiom demonstrated in the roads made by Europeans; it certainly never occurred to them previously, for the sinuosities of the Maori roads, even when crossing a wide plain, have been remarked by every traveller in New Zealand.