Bahrni's Website

Taranaki
"There's a million tonnes of rock around here somewhere..."
Saturday 22nd May 2005

With the expiration of my contract working for the Ministry of Health, I was determined to have a week or so off. Given I'm supposed to be in New Zealand on a working holiday visa and it's been mostly work with not much holiday (due to my not getting paid leave as a contractor), I was keen to have a break.

Jo, meanwhile, had a few days off from her job at the loathsome Duxton, and so we arranged to have a weekend away in the Taranaki District of the north island. Unfortunately we forgot to check the weather before we left, otherwise we might have decided to give the whole thing a miss.

The drive up the west coast is a pleasant rural stretch and with a car now possessing a functional overdrive gear, it's an easy run. The usual collection of impatient and reckless Kiwi drivers were sadly in evidence, but I've come to realise the only response is to be as arrogant and discourteous back. The alternative is suddenly find yourself cut-up at lane merges and having to slam your brakes on.

Still, we traveled up 1N to the improbably named town of Bulls, then headed for Whanganui and north-west towards Taranaki district. For the only time on the weekend that it did, the clouds parted and the outline of the majestic Mt. Taranaki was visible to our left as we drove. Jo attempted (with questionable success) to get a photo from the car, but I foolishly decided to hold off with until we were at our destination, assuming that we'd actually still be able to see the mountain once we arrived in Inglewood. I'd recently come to the conclusion that it's not always the best plan to stay at large cities when visiting a country as they're usually the least representative of the actual culture and most likely to... well... all look rather alike after a while. Inglewood was a test of this theory.

It's a small town on the east side of Mt Taranaki, with supposedly excellent views of the mountain, but by this stage of the evening the clouds had closed in and there was nothing visible on the horizon but gradiented grey. Undeterred we settled into the White Eagle Motel and walked the couple of hundred yards back into the town for an explore.

It didn't take long. Inglewood is not a sprawling metropolis and the centre really only consists of the remains of a railway station and a couple of roads. Jo had been quite keen on checking out a namesake restaurant, MacFarlanes Cafe, but we were thwarted by their early closure. Apparently there wasn't enough business to be worth opening in the evening and so we thought a pub meal would be a nice Plan B.

Sadly this wasn't to be either. Of the two pubs in the centre of Inglewood, one had closed down entirely and the other didn't appeal as a venue for dining. Rather like some of the rural Australian pubs I've seen, this place was bright, grim and full of beer-swilling, sport-watching blokes apparently trying to compete in the game of drinking-themselves-into-an-early-grave.

Using the old technique of seeing where all the locals choose to eat, we bought a chinese carry-out from a place on the road we were staying on and took it back to the motel. The food was pretty good and the portions were verging on the comical. With enough for Jo and myself to stuff ourselves silly, there was still plenty left for a second entire meal, although after it's overnight sojourn in the fridge we didn't feel all that inclined to dig in the following morning.

Instead we packed up the car and drove back to the MacFarlanes Cafe, now open for breakfast and doing a roaring trade. It's a pleasant place with extremely nice food and the salmon and hash-brown eggs benedict I had was sufficiently good to have me debating whether to ask the chef for details on how the home-made hash browns were done. Given how busy the staff were dealing with the ongoing flood of hungry customers, I decided the secret could remain unpersued.

Before we left Inglewood behind, we decided to have a look at the Fun Ho! Toy Museum, initially under the misapprehension that it was a general toy museum like the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh. Instead it transpired that Fun Ho! was the Kiwi equivalent of Corgi; making figures, trucks and trains out of lead and later aluminium (when people started to realised that a dribble-soluble poisonous material is maybe not the smartest thing that Juniors' teething-chewed toy tractor could be made of) and enjoying great success until import-bans were lifted and cheap asian alternatives forced them out of business in the 1980's. Although the lumpy and crudely-painted toys of the Fun Ho! Toy Museum are a testimony to what you can achieve with a captive market and no competition, they still have a certain clunky charm that the staff (well.. the one middle aged bloke) running the museum obviously appreciate. For those unhindered by the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, the admittedly sad fate of the company did seem somewhat inevitable however.

Moving onwards from Inglewood we drove up the lower slopes of the mountain into Egmont National Park, the second oldest national park in New Zealand. From the visitors centre you can get information about the hikes (or "tramps" as they're oddly called in NZ) you can take around the area and get a view of the amazing summit that the mountain has. If, of course, it's not totally shrouded in fog, clouds and rain like it was when we were there. If the weather hadn't quite been so cold and wet, I'd have been keen to go for a bit of a hike up the mountain, at least until you could get a good view, but with an 8-hour time-frame and the total lack of visibility it seemed like rather a pointless waste of energy.

Instead we drove back down the mountain, pausing briefly by Lake Mangamahoe where, in clear conditions, you can see the mountain and it's mirror image reflected in the lake. In our case you can see clouds, more rain and some very wet ducks, but that really wasn't much of a surprise.

Figuring we might have better luck sticking to some man-made attractions, a short drive northwards led us into New Plymouth, a large-ish coastal city with a "beautiful backdrop of Mt. Taranaki". To be fair (assuming clear conditions), nearly everywhere in Taranaki district has Mt. Taranaki as a backdrop as the region is fairly evenly circular and the massive cone of the mountain looms high on the horizon, so New Plymouth really has nothing to shout about in that department.

It does have the historic Richmond Cottage though, one of the earliest stone building created in this part of New Zealand, which is open as a free museum about the areas early European settlers and in particular the original family that inhabited it. It's quite interesting, right up until you discover that the cottage was actually build somewhere else entirely and then moved to it's current location (near the museum) piece by piece. Still claiming it's the original cottage rings small bells about that story regarding the apocryphal "original" axe of George Washington and it's two replacement heads and three replacement shafts.

Still, it's an interesting little museum and worth a visit. Especially when it's pouring rain with no signs of a break. However, one can only stare politely at antique wooden furniture for a limited amount of time before boredom sets in, so Jo and I clambered damply back in the car and went to see what other attractions a wet and wintry New Plymouth could offer us.

On the western side of the town a strange hill projects abruptly out of the landscape and, looking intriguing, we drove towards it. Resembling a smaller version of the Paramount mountain (think of the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark), it's named the Paritutu Rock and you can climb it (we didn't) for a (presumably) spectacular view of dear old Mount Taranaki or, in the opposite direction, the Sugar Loaf Islands, which is a great name. Sadly with the grey failing light and pouring rain, they didn't visually live up their names appealing promise.

After an uneventful night in Opunake, an unremarkable but friendly small town further south, we began our drive back towards Wellington with two last stops. The first was a last-ditch attempt to see something of Mount Taranaki, for which we drove up the southern slopes towards Dawson's Falls. Since our constant companion, the rain, hadn't deserted us overnight, we yet again didn't get any decent views of the mountain, but I figured the Falls should at least be fairly spectacular with all the recent rain. Jo was less than enthusiastic to go for a trek through the forest given the weather, but was finally persuaded to come for the brief hike it would take to get to the waterfall. The vegetation and undergrowth along the track was almost rainforest-like, which wasn't a great surprise, though sadly the temperature was nowhere near a rainforests heady levels. Still, the walk was rather enjoyable, if a bit muddy and the Falls themselves were well worth the trip. I took a number of photos (although the one on this page is obviously taken by Jo as I'm in it) each time having trying to quickly take the photo before the lens was completely covered in rain and spray, but some of them came out quite well.

Back in the welcome heat and shelter of the car, we headed to our final stop; Dairyland. With Jo's parents raising cattle, Jo was keen to see the place, and I had visions of a cow-theme'd version of Jurassic Park. Without all the death and dismemberment obviously. Sadly, aside from a cafe, the "display centre" consisted of a couple of dioramas and some display screens (or did from what we could view through the door). Lacking any actual cows, milking or genuine farmer types, we declined to spend money on the attraction and settled for a photo of the outside. They didn't have a suggestion box, but "some real cows" should really have been put in it were they to have one.

Actually, though we didn't actually stop there, Jo insisted I take a photo on the way past of the Manawatu Rugby ground, or at least its stand. Apparently the place is the inspiration for Footrot Flats, a kiwi comic strip that's been running since the mid-seventies. It doesn't mean anything to me, but a lot of Kiwis and Aussies will know about it. Which is more than I do. For Jo the photo is reproduced here.