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Pictures from Lakeland
The Blue and Green Lakes

Written and Illustrated by Joyce West

A few miles out of Rotorua, on the main highway to the coast, the road to the buried village of Wairoa turns inland to the hills. It is a part of the route followed on that world-famous tourist excursion, the Government Round Trip.

Approaching from the Rotorua side, you climb a long hill into forestry plantations where, from the crest, you look back and see spread before you the lovely shining stretches and bays of Rotorua, and the blue sunlit citadel of Mokoia Island, and the town, like a toy Swiss village, in a languid white mist, beneath the brooding Shadow of Ngongotaha mountain.

Nearing the lakes, you enter upon the green beauty of the famous Tikitapu Bush. Graceful tree-ferns sweep down to brush your car, and the cool gloom of the bush casts a pleasant shade upon the white winding road. The tapering boles of the tall native pines rise like grey pillars, sheathed in clinging moss and vines; the cliffsides are green with overlapping fernfronds. In the konini trees the tuis whistle liquidly, and, from some far gully, comes the faint chink of a fairy hammer on a golden anvil, the note of a questing bellbird. It is a lovely and peaceful scene, and against the blue sky glows the brilliant crimson of the rata's fire. Only the grey gaunt trunk of an ancient rimu, raising blasted arms above his fellows, strikes a note that is a reminder of that grim night, now more than fifty years ago, when another and more terrible fire fell from Heaven.

The road climbs to the crest of a low ridge, and there they lie, one on either hand of you, the twin lakes, rare jewels of mountain beauty.

The Round Trip is a trip of lakes. You cross Rotomahana, with its smoking roaring cliffs, and its opal-blue waters that simmer with a strange subterranean heat; you pass over the cold secret reaches of rippling Tarawera. The road skirts Okareka, pale and cool and fern-fringed: only just beyond lies lovely Okataina, thrusting long silver fingers into the bush-clad hills. You see the wonders of the great rift of the Waimangu Geyser Valley; you see that grim furrowed mountain Tarawera; you see the quiet secluded valley of Wairoa, where a Maori village that was peaceful and thriving fifty years ago, lies buried deep beneath the green sod and ferns. You see the grave of the Eighth Wonder of the World, the Pink and White Terraces, that great sight that drew overseas tourists when New Zealand was a colony forty years old, and the coaches and teams struggled through the mud of the Rotorua roads.

But perhaps you will remember longest of all your sight of the twin lakes: Tikitapu like a round sapphire set in a rim of silver, Roto-kakahi as a mirror of polished jade, cold, unruffled, and secret.

Only a razor-backed ridge, steep and narrow, separates the two lakes, yet one is green, and one is blue, whatever the colour of the sky above them.

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Around Tikitapu, roll the low ranges of bush-covered hills. Between bush and water are quiet coves and crescent beaches where the translucent waters lap the platinum-white pumice sand. Tikitapu runs the gamut of all jewel blues. Under a clear morning sky it burns as a liquid sapphire. The clouds dull it to opal, with secret gleams of colour. Under rain it is turquoise, flattended and milky.

To look down upon Roto-kakahi, is like turning your eyes to a different world. The jade-green waters of Rotokakahi wind in a long graceful curve, set by small wooded islands, and bound by harshly-scarred bluffs. If Tikitapu is blue as sunlight, Roto-kakahi is green as moonlight, as cold as the moon, as luminously aloof.

The island of Motutawa, rising in a low cone from the still waters, has a dark story. It was once the home of a section of the Tuhourangi tribe, fierce raiders, whose war-canoes were the terror of many a lakeside village. Sound of the harsh echo of the warconch from Motutawa was signal for women to fly from the fields, and men to their weapons, with the dread cry… “The Tuhourangi are abroad!” Unhappy indeed the village caught unprepared when the Tuhourangi struck. Then would rise up to Heaven the wailing of the women, and the smoke of the pillaging fires.

Darkest episode in the history of Motutawa was the treacherous slaying early in the last century, of a band of visiting Ngapuhi Maoris. A great feast was prepared for the visitors, and while all was at its height, the dancing and the feasting and the merrymaking, at a pre-arranged signal, the Tuhourangi fell upon the northerners, and speared them, and dragged their bodies down to the lake. How coldly and how sullenly must the green waters have washed away that crimson tide!

But they could not hold their secret for ever. By devious ways, the unforgiveable tale crept back to the villages of the murdered men. It came to the ears of the great sea-lord Hongi Hika, and there and then he swore vengeance upon the tribes of the Lake country. He equipped and provisioned the men of his war-fleet, and they swept down from the north like a flight of fierce sea-eagles. On the coast at Maketu they landed and forced their way inland up the Pongakawa River, into the mountains until they reached Roto-ehu. From the shore of Roto-ehu they built a road, and made their famous overnight portage to Roto-iti, sailed on through the Ohau Channel, and swept upon the lakeside villages of Rotorua, killing, burning, and pillaging, to at last capture the sacred fortress of Mokoia Island, and break the sovereignty of the great and proud Arawa tribes.

Small wonder, indeed, that the waters of Roto-kakahi seem to hold dark secrets!

From the shore, almost opposite to Motutawa Island, a weathered point of land juts abruptly into the lake. It is the site of the ancient Maori fortress of Kaiteriria, unhallowed by three centuries of witchcraft and dark magic. It was old when the white man came to New Zealand, so fabled that it was almost a legendary spot.

During the period of the last Maori Wars, the Arawa Constabulary made Kaiteriria their headquarters, and turned the old fortress into a military camp. It was a spot admirably suited to their purpose, set between the lake and the impregnable hill behind, guarding the old foot-track between Rotorua and Taupo. The Constabulary men set up their tents in the square sacred to the old strange rites of the tohunga, and picketed their horses where the rustling ranks of poi-dancers had sung and swayed. If you were to haunt Kaiteriria of a night, hoping to catch some faint vibrations of the old days, the wild incantations and the thrumming of the dancers’ feet, it is much more likely that you would hear the jovial strains of some Victorian mess-song drifting incongruously across the cold green waters of the midnight lake.

The old order passes. The Constabulary men are gone now, and their heroic frontier times live only with the days of old Kaiteriria, in the tales of the past.

It was in those far-off magic days when gods walked the earth, that the Great Dragon lived in his cave above the blue waters of Tikitapu. He was a terrible creature; for all his great bulk he could move silently, and pounce like a tiger, and with one snap of his dreadful jaws he could devour a full-grown man. Woe betide the lone traveller, for no puny weapons of his availed against the Dragon's scalearmoured hide, and his nostrils breathing out fire and thunderings!

You will find no Dragon on the lakes-road to-day. Only the swift shining cars shuttle back and forth over the winding bush bends, and the tourists buy Kodak films at the little Wairoa store, and take their thermos flasks and drink tea in the white secluded coves where the wild war-cry of the Tuhourangi raiders once pealed across the cold lake water. From the shallow reaches of Tarawera and Okataina, the trout fishermen bring back their laden bags, and the sportsmen go up with guns after pigs and the fleet wild deer into that hunter's paradise, the broken country around the foot of Tarawera mountain.

The old days are gone, the days of the Dragon and the days of magic, the days of the old black rites of witchcraft and the cannibal raiders, the days of Hongi Hika and his wild seaeagles—gone for ever! Even the face of the country is changed, for the forestry road runs up the once-sacred ridge between the two lakes, and the Government plantations of speartopped pines and larches clothe the harsh outlines of the hills in a blanket of alien green.

Only the lakes remain the same, Roto-kakahi, green as moonlight, holding its dark secrets for ever, and the blue jewel waters of sacred Tikitapu, lapped about by guardian hills.

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