The name was the first thing to enchant me: “The Forgotten World Highway” – it sounded like something from Tolkien or Harry Potter. And so, a short distance behind the glockenspiel in Stratford’s main street, I felt compelled to turn east and head for the hills, through the hummocks of lush, lumpy grassland and trimmed box thorn hedges. As a parting gift, Mt Egmont/Taranaki revealed for a moment its snowy top and then disappeared beneath a duvet of puffy cloud.
I stopped to buy fruit at a farmhouse stall. “Going over the hill?” asked the farmer nodding towards the pinched peaks and endless ridges. “No sweat, but she’s a bit upsy-downsy.”
The first significant ridge was Strathmore Saddle. By then the fertile volcanic plains that nurture the herds of Taranaki’s dairy cows have become steep, rough-grassed back country carrying beef-cattle and sheep. The road up here had been the curse of early travellers – a sea of mud in the winter and powdery dust in summer, but on a fine day the view might have been worth it. To the east I could see Mt Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu. To the west was the bulky form of Egmont/Taranaki.
From there the road dipped, spun and dropped, then rose again to Pohokura Saddle. It used to take three days to pack supplies from Stratford to this point. I had driven it in an hour.
I looked down the slope that had once held a significant railway workers camp while the tunnel (now beneath my feet) had been pushed through gigantic ramparts of rock. Forged through such rugged terrain, the railway from Stratford to Taumarunui is now a monument to determination. The daunting task was started in 1901 but not finished until 1932 because most able-bodied men had marched off to WWI.
I journeyed on past fences fuzzy with lichen, tufted pastures, radiata pine plantations and black beech forests and climbed to Whangamomona Saddle, 270 metres above the sea.
Getting the road through here had been a major challenge and lives of both people and pack horses were lost before the township of Whangamomona was finally reached in 1897. But conditions were still appalling. When Prime Minister Richard Seddon attended a banquet in this town in 1903, the driver of his carriage was (apparently) bribed to take him through every available pothole and then tip him into a boggy ditch. The PM took the point and funding was forthcoming for improvements.
The village of Whangamomana never grew much and today is almost a ghost town, with many of its buildings abandoned. But what it lacks in size it makes up for in personality. In the spruced-up pub where possum skins, deer antlers and pig’s heads adorn the walls, I read of the robust community spirit.
Resisting changes to the regional boundary in 1989, the village declared itself a republic. Fourteen years on, the president is a poodle called Thai and every Independence Day a rumbustious crowd of outsiders swarms into town for whip-cracking, tug-of-war and sheep racing competitions, music, song and dance.
All was quiet on the day I passed through. A man called Harry dressed in Swandri and gumboots clumped into the bar for a midday pint. I played a game of pool with him, drank a glass of cider and drove on. I still had the Moki Road tunnel just up the hill and the long Tangarakau Gorge to negotiate before dark.
At the bridge that crosses the Tangarakau River, hidden in the dense bush that crowds its banks, is the grave of Joshua Morgan, the surveyor who first blazed a trail along the forbidding recesses of the gorge. He died there, at the age of 35, of an untreated infection. Sixty years later his wife was buried beside him. It must have been extraordinarily remote in his day: it still feels that way.
Perpendicular cliffs and dense podocarp forest screen the sun. Below the road the river, the colour of liquorice, snakes silently along its rocky bed. A primeval, menacing gloom made me think of the bowels of Mordor. This is New Zealand as early explorers must have found it but without the road and without the thoughts of dinner an hour or so later in Taumarunui.
Highway 43 reveals the history of a bold, rugged, fascinating part of the North Island’s dramatic interior. Despite its name, it’s a drive I’ll find hard to forget.
