Heritage Trails

Photograph-Manapouri Underground Power Station, Fiordland National Park, Doubtful Sound, New Zealand-10"x8" Photo Print expertly made in the USA

The road was extended to Mission Bay following the construction of Orakei Bridge and then on to St Heliers. It was initially constructed as a single-lane metalled carriageway, largely by 1000 unemployed men using picks, shovels and horse-drawn carts, however during the latter stages of construction steam-driven rollers and tractors were used

Development of a road was not until 1926 when construction commenced on a 3.5-mile section between Campbell’s Point and Hobson Point to service the increasing number of houses that were then being built especially in Orakei and East Tamaki using ‘cheap’ labour as a result of the economic Depression.

Tamaki Drive links Auckland’s central business district with the exclusive and trendy eastern suburbs of Orakei, Mission Bay, Kohimarama and St Heliers. Skirting the coast line it provides largely uninterrupted and unfolding picture postcard vistas of the Waitemata Harbour and seascape.

Tamaki Drive links Auckland’s central business district with the exclusive and trendy eastern suburbs of Orakei, Mission Bay, Kohimarama and St Heliers. Skirting the coast line it provides largely uninterrupted and unfolding picture postcard vistas of the Waitemata Harbour and seascape.

Tamaki Drive links Auckland’s central business district with the exclusive and trendy eastern suburbs of Orakei, Mission Bay, Kohimarama and St Heliers. Skirting the coast line it provides largely uninterrupted and unfolding picture postcard vistas of the Waitemata Harbour and seascape.

Much head-scratching had drawn the conclusion that the only thing Ohakune had going for it, other than the railway station a couple of kilometres from the town, was the mountain that reared up over it to the north.

It seemed that the mountain town of Ohakune was doomed to permanent decline, like Raetihi, its sister town on the south edge of the central North Island volcanic plateau.

The road-builders found the first 20 kilometres or so of the Desert Road north from Waiouru relatively easy going with the volcanic pumice providing a firm and solid base.

The declaration of war on Germany in September that year sent the Desert Road construction into over-drive after the Army identified 65,000 hectares of the Rangipo Desert as an ideal training ground.

By mid-1939 work was progressing steadily on constructing a six-metre wide road through the sparse snow-grasses and tussocks that are all that can grow since the mass sterilisation of other seeds by the mainly ignimbrite lava flows of 20,000 years earlier.

The road-builders found the first 20 kilometres or so of the Desert Road north from Waiouru relatively easy going with the volcanic pumice providing a firm and solid base, but before the road was sealed the pumice also generated great clouds of choking dust that were a deterrent against users.

Of all the key roads in the North Island, none was as late coming into regular usage as that which runs across the Rangipo Desert between Waiouru and Tokaanu, east of the mountains Ruapehu, Tongariro and Ngauruho

From its opening in 1923 the Otira rail tunnel has ranked as an extraordinary feat of engineering. HUGH DE LACY tells its story. It was the vast quantities of gold being mined on the West Coast from the 1860s onwards that prompted the good burghers of Canterbury to dream of a rail link across the great divide of the Southern Alps.

It is a now a direct, all-sealed, and exceptionally scenic link between Queenstown and Wanaka, but Otago’s Crown Range Road is perhaps more famous for a pub built on the original miner’s track in 1863.

It is a now a direct, all-sealed, and exceptionally scenic link between Queenstown and Wanaka, but Otago’s Crown Range Road is perhaps more famous for a pub built on the original miner’s track in 1863.