The Simple Way.

Perhaps the ideal way of travelling through and learning to know a wonderful and beautiful and rugged bit of country is to traverse it first on foot or on horseback, camping out and fending for yourself. A summer tour of that character, living awhile in the bush, listening to the bird-song of morning and evening, climbing the ranges, clambering along the banks of the mountain streams, inhaling night and day the fragrance of the bush—that is the only way to enter into the spirit of the wild places. There is, too, the Maori life, and those human associations, the old, old tribal story, the tales and songs of the mountain folk, form at least half the attractions of travel in the Urewera Country or a backblocks tour through some other native district.

Then, if you like, return to the old place, when the new roads permit, and travel it as luxuriously as you like, in your car that takes only an hour to cover the ground that once you measured with your feet in a long day's tramp. There is satisfaction of a kind in contemplating the contrast, as I have done in more districts than one. Inevitably you think with a certain degree of longing of the old camp days. But would you leave your comfortable car and take to the swag and the old black billy and the long foot-slog again? Hardly! You haven't the time, the muscles, or the wind.