BEAUTIFUL WAIPORI.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19328, 15 May 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

BEAUTIFUL WAIPORI.

A DUNEDIN MOTOR TRIP. BV ELSIE K. MORTON. Auckland has learned more of Dunedin in the last six months than in the past fifty vears, and among the memories that thousands will cherish of their visit to the Exhibition City, none will he more vivid, more pleasurable, than the famous trip to Waipori Gorge. It is a trip that no northerner who sojourns henceforth m the southern city should miss, for it- opens up vistas of scenery that are a veritable revelation to those accustomed to the typical forest and river scenery of the North Island. The exhibition has made Waipori famous. The rare beauties of the winding road that leads far back into the mountains, where Dunedin s hydro-elec-tric power is generated, were scarcely known in Dunedin itself a year ago. Only the most hardy of motorists cared to face the tortuous windings of the narrow road that runs twelve miles through the ranges, a slender thread of a road, cut in " the face of precipices that frown on the foaming torrent of the Waipori River in the depths of the valley below. To-day it is probably the most talked-of scenic motor run in New Zealand. While the exhibition was open, over 1.2,000 visitors, from every part of the Dominion, made the trip safety, experienced the thrill of Waipori s diz/.v curves, and returned to their homes to tell of its beauties. When the exhibition opened, the road was put in first-class order. Ihe riverbed shingle has packed down to a surface almost as hard as concrete, the grade is an exceptionally easy one, and scores of visitors have been making the trip to Waipori every day in charabancs. To see a fleet of half a dozen of these great vehicles creeping cautiously down the mountain side, round hairpin bends where a single error in steering would send car and passengers over the cliff, is a fascinating sight, and it speaks volumes for the care and efficiency of the Dunedin Corporation drivers that thousands of passengers have been carried to Waipori and back without a single serious mishap. Relics of Early Days. We set out on the 40-mile run to Waipori on a grey autumn morning when the mist-clouds lay in billowy folds on the crest of Mount Cargill, and the wayside grasses were beaded with moisture, a still, windless morning with a dash of winter in the damp air. Out past Caversham and its big industrial school, down through the hills of Green Island and Fairfield districts, with the wide expanse of Taien Plains stretching far away in the distance. A most, interesting stretch of road this, with many a reminder of old-time coaching days in the ancient inns by the wayside, low-roofed little gabled "houses with spacious stables in the yards, and half-obliterated signs that once bespoke welcome refreshment for man and beast in the days when all roads led to the golden land of promise beyond. Oil one of those ancient hostelries I made out the sign of " The Unicorn," in rainwashed, almost undecipherable lettering, and a few miles farther on was another, more ancient still, just a crumbling old ruin of wattle-arid-dab, the material of which Otago's earliest homes were constructed. Every few miles came other reminders of the past, in tumble-down, disused blacksmiths' shops, replaced now by garages adorned with "petrol advertisements in blinding orange-arid-vermil-ion lettering.

Through Mosgiel we crawled at a decorous 15 miles an hour, then came the Taieri Plains, and a grey ribbon of road stretching mile after mile between fertile fields and hawthorn hedges (lending to the grass with autumn's crimson burthen. . . . Thirty-five miles, 40 miles, 45 . . . a long spin at 50. with hedges and fields just a whizzing blurr and the wind shouting in our ears. Then down to a steady 40, over the bridges with a flying hump and a heave, and every hit of traffic, hoof and wheel, left far*behind. By the time we reached the entrant** to Waipori fJorge we had passed six, charabancs and eight motor-cars, had rounded a corner on two wheels at 30 miles an hour and missed a gorse hedge by six inches, hut they think nothing of little wayside incidents like that in Otago! At the entrance to the Gorge there is a notice board announcing that the road" ahead contains many dangerous bends with fewplaces for cars to pass fine another, that the utmost care must he taken, a slow pace maintained throughout, that horns must be tooted at every corner, that but by that time the notice board was half a mile behind and one had to guess the rest. Not that the road is a dangerous one as Auckland appraises such things; no one who has ever faced the road to the West Coast, for instance, could work up any feeling of uneasiness about Waipori, but southerners have not been hardened up to rigours such as these. Through the Gorge. Having dutifully slowed down to the saail crawl enforced bv the winding curves, and the opening and shutting of gates every few hundred yards, we feasted our eyes for the next hour nn a wonderful pageant of mountain and river scenery. The road for several miles lay close to the river lied, then came a very gradual ascent and presently a wild grandeur replaced the placid, riverside, beauty of the lower levels. Straight up from the bod of the river rose bush-clad cliffs, towering up into the grey sky, with heavy mist-clouds obscuring their majestic heights. Even so must the wild mountains of the Scottish Highlands frown up into grey northern skies, unlit by the cheering flood of sunshine that is sunny Auckland's heritage. The luxuriant. beauty of the ferny undergrowth of the North Island, the lovely groves of ponga fern and nikau, were missing, but here was a beauty quite new to northern eyes, that of groves of magnificent birch trees, their rich green foliage tipped and flecked most alluringly with patches of gold, the first touch of Jack Frost's chill hand. Stately rirrius, better known in the South Island as red pine, tanikaha, totara, konini, lancewood, matai—almost all the picturesque beauty of (he northern forests was here, but one missed the smooth, grev bole, the spreading canopy of King Kauri. The wayside beauty was typical «-,f South Island scenery. The creamy plumes of the toi-toi waved beside great sprays of scarlet briar berries; here and there the gold of late-flowering broom, glowed against the sap-green background of birch foliage. And the river! Imagine a river of clearest topaz, shading to gold in the shallows, deepening to wonderful tints of chocolate-brown, almost winered, in clear, still pools beneath the overhanging cliffs. Blue rivers, green rivers, crystal-clear rivers had 1 seen, but never before a golden river such as this, not the turbid yellow of a river in flood, but clear as champagne, with stretches of red-gold sand showing beneath its shining surface. In some places, the river was but a slender thread, winding in and out at the foot of the ravine, but one didn't look too long over the 200 ft. drop when the car was rounding those particular bends! Then the road sloped to the floor of the valley, and ran beside a stretch of foaming rapids, with the surge and splash of an unseen waterfall coming from somewhere behind the dense green curtain of undergrowth. The grey cloud caps drew closer and closer,' filmy mist wraiths shrouded the valleys. At last, far above, the workmen's cottages and buildings of Waipori settlement showed through a swirl of mist. Up a steep zig-zag, and to the luncheon room on the crest of the hill, then later on, a visit to the power-house, set in the narrowest part of the valley, amid wild and beautiful scenery of rocky precipice and winding river. Fortunate indeed is Dunedin in having been able to give to her people in Waipori, not only a hydro-electric scheme, but a scenic asset that will remain for all time one of the city's most priceless possessions.