The Alps, the Forests, the Lakes.

Crossing to the South Island, one finds something quite different again in such a railway tour as the run across the Canterbury Plains and along the curving coast of North Otago, the greatest area of agricultural land in the Dominion, as distinguished from the dairying pastures of the North. Here is the perfection of serene country scenery, with many a sightly village and town.

Most holiday-makers will make for the three main pleasurelands—the West Coast with its lakes and glaciers, the Mt. Cook alpine region, and Wakatipu and other lakes of the Otago-Southland country.

First in the interest that bold and unusual scenery makes is the trans-alpine train journey by Arthur's Pass and the Otira tunnel, a line of great engineering works and of a sometimes startling quality of beauty. Forest, lake and torrent page 29 are the predominating features of a West Coast rail tour, and from the train terminus there is the motor run to the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, within easy reach of Hokitika now that the wild rivers have been bridged. There is nothing like those two wondrously beautiful glaciers on the eastern face of the Alps, nothing like the forests of rata and ferntrees which frame the glittering down-plunging tongues of ice thrust from the open jaws of the mountains.

The lakes, too, are a glory of that farstretching Coast. For two hundred miles from the Grey River southward the rich Westland forests are blue-spangled with lakes, calm mirrors of the Alpine snows and the trees. Kanieri, close to Hokitika, is typical of these lakes of the woods. Its shores are forested to the water's edge. The air is full of the bush fragrance and the voices of the bush birds. From the waterline the hill spurs, in overlapping folds of tender foliage, sweep back to the snowy mountains, all on a clear quiet day reversed with unbroken imagery on the glassy lake floor. Every here and there the rocky coast is broken by little white sandy beaches, at any of which one may land by the simple process of running the motor-launch nose on to the shore. For days the water lies spread out like a polished silver plate, the only motion an almost imperceptible heave of its calm bosom.