A Northern visitor to Nelson recently expressed his delight at hearing the notes of the tui in the trees which adorn that city, and he praised the sylvan beauty of the place. Akaroa, a smaller town, arouses like pleasure in its visitors, who can listen to not only the tui but the bellbird in the gardens and orchards. The scenery of Banks Peninsula and the character and surroundings of Akaroa are described in this article.

Ruaimoko, the Maori God of the underworld, the personification of volcanic action, has done much for the Canterbury coast. But for that many-peaked uplift of land, indented in a score of bays and harbours, a huge nest of fiery furnaces in the remote past, it would have been a drear monotony of level shoreline, with never a navigable haven for ships. The convulsions of Nature which heaved this wildly broken massif above the ocean made the port that is now Lyttelton, and that even finer harbour Akaroa. The weathering down of the old volcanoes over untold centuries and tens of centuries, gave Banks Peninsula the richest of soil, made it the garden land it is to-day. Beauty of landscape, too, was produced by those forces that thrust up all manner of fantastic peaks, tors and crags, castle rocks of the Titans, haunt in Maori legend of those mystic folk the Patupaiarehe. Those dark fortresses of fairyland, those outjutting bastions and walls done in Nature's most erratic architecture of lava rock, those black and grey fingers and thumbs protruding from the richly grassed hills express the stormy past in skylines that are a complete contrast to the long sleek levels of the Canterbury Plains.

Geological history is here plain as printed words, the story of the rocks and peaks that all may read. I can imagine no more interesting journey for an observant lover of unusual landscapes than that combined rail and motor jaunt from Christchurch to Akaroa through this ancient playground of the gods.