Road trip - Wellington to Taupo

Driving up to Taupo from Wellington and back, we drive through some quintessential Kiwi-land with iconic scenery and towns. Allow me to share it with you.

The town of Bulls has pictures of the beasts everywhere and a slightly disturbing anatomically correct statue outside a medical clinic. It boasts it is ‘not just a turn-off’. No, it’s more than that; it is the home of terri-bull puns. The real estate agent sells houses for $200,000 that are ‘live-a-bull’ and ‘own-a-bull’ and a shop that sells cheap designer gear is called la-bulls.

Bulls does have a really good shop called Bili Tees which sells great t-shirts featuring koru, rainbows or fun slogans from ‘Taupo – it’ll float your boat’ to ‘NZ – the grass is just greener’ or ‘Shut the Hutt up’ – Him Outdoors reckons that last one could drop the last word and still be effective.

It is, indeed, very green with lots of rolling hills in the distance and flat farmland and appalling impatient driving in the foreground. Acres of pleasant iconographic scenery are marred only by Tui billboards; isn’t it time to put these out to pasture? The ‘Yeah, right’ slogan was vaguely amusing when it emerged five years ago but now it is tired and lazy and a poor excuse for humour that unintelligent letter-writers use to share their unoriginal drivel with the nation, thinking they are oh-so-witty.

Taihape welcomes you with a corrugated iron Wellington boot and a ‘Gumboot café’ (Translation – gumboots are what Kiwis call Wellington boots). The town seems to have built itself entirely around said boot and they even have a festival where they set records for the furthest distance one can throw a boot. This all came about because ‘Taihape Promotions’ wanted to promote their town in the 1980s. Due to the decline of the railways and the removal of government subsidies on agricultural supplies, the town was suffering and population fell from 3,500 in the early 1960s to about 1,800 in 1985.

In an attempt to reverse the economic downturn and attract people to their town, the promotions people came up with the idea of marketing themselves as living in gumboot country. According to the Taihape Information Centre, Gumboot Day was invented to ‘entice travellers to stop and see what Taihape had to offer.’ It’s astounding what passes for entertainment in some places, but they do honest burgers on proper buns that don’t taste processed, so full marks for that.

There are ringing bells and flashing lights but no barriers at a State Highway 1 level crossing just outside Taihape as we wait for a train to pass. How much would barriers cost to install? Surely they’d be worth it. With the scarcity of trains in New Zealand you’d have to be very unlucky to get caught out on a level crossing but the Ministry of Transport figures reveal that between 1998 and 2004 there were 158 accidents at level crossings – 55 of them fatal. That seems like 55 too many deaths to me.

Ruapehu is enveloped in cloud as usual as the pylons march along the desert road. It is dry, windy and barren with nothing but studs of tussock punctuating the swathes of dirt. Caravans and boats crawl across the landscape with snail trails of impatient traffic in their wake.

Passing through Waiouru, warning signs advise us that ‘Army exercises are conducted at any time’ and ‘live firing and explosions’. They suggest we stay on the road for our own safety. Where else are we going to go? The road twists, turns and dips like a rollercoaster in a bizarre lunar theme park.

Long-haired kids in t-shirts and low-rider shorts swing on the gun barrels and stand on the tanks’ turrets at the Army Museum. The Oasis Hotel looks stunningly uninviting. I know it’s the end of the desert road (there’s that ‘humour’ again), but you’d be more tempted to die of thirst.

Straight roads are lined with uniform fir trees and bright bushes of gorse. Sharp-beaked magpies wait for roadkill and the clouds are pushed out to the edge of the horizon like frothy suds around a bottomless blue pool.

Turangi is apparently the trout capital of the world, with an obligatory model of a big trout. The scenery changes to babbling brooks, weeping willows and neat roads fringed with green and pampas grasses. We catch our first sighting of Lake Taupo at Mission Bay where two black swans usher their cygnets jealously away from onlookers.