There is a new road, little travelled as yet, that surpasses some of our celebrated tourist routes—the Buller Gorge, for example—as a highway of unusual landscape values. Some day it will take popular rank as a road of wonder and beauty, and big tourist ‘buses will hurtle round its dizzy corners. They will not hurtle yet awhile; the road is precariously narrow in places and the overhanging mountains have a trick of toppling a rock or so down on the wheelway carved out of their grey flanks.

I had imagined I knew all the wild glens and rugged traverses in and about the Urewera mountain land, from the western sierras to the tapu peak, Maungapohatu, and the gulches and cliffs of the Huiarau range and down to the bays of Waikaremoana. Foot and horseback and camp in the forests that cover most of that region, spread over forty years, gave a pretty thorough knowledge of the highlands and the Maori people. But until a few months ago I had not seen at close quarters that section of the western buttresses of the Tuhoe land between the Galatea plains and the Rotorua—Whakatane main highway at Te Teko.

The link between these places is supplied by this new road, thirty-two miles in length. It was made to give the Government's newly-broken in farm settlement at Galatea—or more correctly, Tauaroa—and the outer world an alternative route to the long way round, via the Kaingaroa Plain and Rotorua. It also gives the Urewera Maoris a better way of communication between Ruatoki and the Whakatane plains and the mountain villages.