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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 5, Issue 2 (June 2, 1930)

Te Wairoa, Tarawera and Roto-mahana

Te Wairoa, Tarawera and Roto-mahana.

The road from Rotorua to Te Wairoa, the historic buried village at the west end of Lake Tarawera, is a way of beauty and story. It passes through the woods of Rauporoa and Turwiriwiri; this bush was destroyed by the eruption of 1886, but has grown again with good luxuriance, ferny and mossy and creeper-hung. There is Lake Tikitapu, of turquoise hue, shadowed over by forested mountains and dark fern slants; beyond, again, are the new forests of the Government plantations.

There is its sister lake, Roto-kakahi, green in colour, with its two islands; and then there is Tarawera spread out before you, with the sinister old mountain looming blue-grey above it.

There are some of the remains of the old buildings; the broken tops of the church windows up there on the terrace of Te Mu, are just level with the ground to-day. Elms and oaks, poplars and blue-gums, flowering acacia, all grow green on the Wairoa. On the way up to an old mission house, there is an avenue of great it or whanake, cabbage trees, planted there three-quarters of a century ago. Up page 29 yonder, in those flower-decked shades, where wild strawberries and blue columbines grow, I heard one day the high sweet “whee, whee, whee, tio-o” of the shining cuckoo, the pipi-wharauroa, sounding clear and sharp as a Navy bo's'n's whistle, high amidst the leafy rigging of the gums.