Tongariro National Park.
A Marvellous Playground.

At last an old prophecy has been fulfilled. Many world travellers have predicted that Ton- page 28 gariro National Park, 150,000 acres, a domain of the State, in the heart of the North Island, will be one of the world's great playgrounds. Lack of accommodation for tourists has delayed the realisation of that expectation, but now this marvellous region is beginning properly to achieve its destiny, by the co-operation of the Tongariro National Park Tourist Co. with the Government Board concerned with this estate. The new Tongariro Chateau, is equally as well equipped for comfort as the Mount Cook Hermitage, and comes up to the standards of service desired by tourists of all countries. There is satisfactory provision also for folk who may choose less luxurious living than the Chateau offers.

This park, which is only ten miles from the Main Trunk Railway, is circled by motor roads, and is remarkably easy of access from all districts of the Island. “The Park is the grandstand of schools for education in wild nature—in geology, vulcanology, subalpine and alpine flora, glacial action, the action of running water on rock—all the processes of Nature that the highland country shows,” writes Mr. James Cowan in a very interesting illustrated book on this Park. “Steaming craters, sulphurous pits, a boiling lake, ice-cold lakes, glaciers, snowfields, alpine slopes inviting ‘snowmanship’ in sport, torrents and bubbling springs, rapids, and waterfalls, huge cliffs and rocky pinnacles, forests and wild fern gardens, mountain meadows bright with leagues of flowers — to enumerate the varied scenes of Tongariro Park is almost to make a catalogue of all New Zealand's landscapes.”

Moreover, Tongariro Park flanks the Thermal Wonderland of Taupo, Wairakei, and Rotorua, and the world's best waters for rainbow trout.