The story of human endeavour and adventure that so often forms half the interest of beautiful landscapes is not absent from the railway route through the Bay of Plenty. The very names of stations bring back to the New Zealander, who knows the story of the coast, memories of heroic struggle, of thrilling episodes in which brown man and white confronted each other.

This fruitful, peaceful countryside, where the railway is the artery that vitalises the farmer's business, wore a very different face less than three generations ago. Men still living in those parts can tell of the day when they lived in parapeted and stockaded forts, and fought their enemies along the track where the rails now run; of the years when British gunboats threw shot and shell on to the beach that is now part of the route to Taneatua. But to most travellers along this pleasant Bay of Plenty this lore of the past is still an unopened book once Tauranga, with its oft-told story of the Gate Pa battle, is left behind.

From Maunganui, that bold rocky gatepost to Tauranga Harbour—Te Maunga, “The Mount,” is the railway station at its foot—you will see a long sea-strand stretching far away eastward, with its ever advancing and retreating line of sunlit surf. In the distance the green bluff and tableland of Maketu break the even glistening line of the beach; then beyond again it stretches into the soft blue haze of faraway. That sea-beach was once upon a time the only road. “We had a good beach,” is a phrase that frequently occurs in a MS., diary of the very early Seventies given me by a veteran colonial officer, a captain of Maori Constabulary. It means that the tide suited for the horseback journey and for the numerous river crossings. The ride from Tauranga to Opotiki usually took two days. The first day's ride took the horsemen as far as Matata; that afternoon's journey was along the famous sands of the Maramarua and Kaokaoroa, where the newly constructed railway line runs to-day.