A Georgian Mansion in the Wilds. The Very Beginning... New Zealand Railways Magazine, (September 1, 1929) There has been a wonderful transformation at the old Whakapapa hut site. The groups of huts and the central Lodge now fall into the background, for the dominating feature to-day is a magnificent building resembling a Georgian mansion. The site has been well picked, for it commands views of the wide plains with forest on the horizon, Ngauruhoe standing out clear from base to summit, and Ruapehu with its permanent snow-caps in the background. Chateau Tongariro, which is almost ready for guests, is an immense stride from the humble wooden huts, but it stands as a monument to the faith of the National Park Board and the lessees, in the possibilities of the Park when New Zealanders realise that they can live luxuriously in the wilds. There is nothing suggestive of the hotel type about the new Chateau. It stands just clear of the beautiful beech forest, and is so well designed that when the grounds are cleared of the present jumble of building material, Chateau Tongariro will fit
distractions of foreground detail. Whether this was a brilliant inspiration of the architect, Mr. H. Hall, of Timaru, or planned for the convenience of placing a boilerhouse, a cafeteria, and many other useful appendages to a large establishment away from the main floor does not matter—the idea is a happy one. It has led to another notable feature, an inclined carriageway to the main entrance, which
nicely into the whole picture.
In A Unique Setting. Chateau Tongariro, with Mt. Ruapehu (9,175ft.) in the background.
When it is formally opened, readers will learn from the newspapers a large number of facts about its structure—how many bricks and tons of cement it represents. Here may be given a few rapid impressions which come of a tour through the nearly completed building. First, the setting up of the main floor above the general level ofhe ground enables glorious views to be enjoyed without
is provided with an extensive colonnaded portico. When future guests reach the Chateau entrance they will discover, without leaving their cars, that the portico frames one of the most remarkable views to be obtained from any hotel entrance in the world, for it is set exactly in line with a vista of an active volcano. Framed by
the pillars of the portico is a perfect view of Ngauruhoe, from base to smoking crater.Ruapehu's Hot Lake.In . Ruapehu (9,175ft.) in the background. The public rooms are all planned on extremely spacious lines, and will enable the Chateau to cater easily for considerably more guests than will find accommodation in its ninety bedrooms. The main
lounge, its plate-glass windows providing glorious views of the mountains and plains, has a floor area of 3,000 sq. feet, the centre finished in beautiful parquetry and “sprung” for dancing. Leading from the lounge is an equally spacious dining room, again providing wonderful views. Decorative effects are chaste, and not
overdone. The walls of the lounge and dining-room are finished in old ivory, delicately gilded. There is a strong but effective note of colour contrasin the jade green patterned carpet of the dining room. There are three storeys above the main floor, each having as the central feature a large writing lounge. The bedrooms have been planned to give a wide variety of accommodation, and the affluent tourist who desires a high degree of luxury will find his wishes have been anticipated. However, the Chateau has not by any means been built exclusively for rich patrons, but so cleverly has the plan been designed that there is not a “back bedroom” in the building. All rooms have a pleasant aspect, and all corridors are lighted from outside. There is electric light, of course, and one excellent lighting idea, which could only occur to people thoroughly experienced in hotel practice, is that ground lights, about a foot from the floor, illuminate the passages, so that the staff may carry out duties late or early without bright lights shining to the bedrooms through the fanlights. As there are 43 bathrooms, there should be no dressing-gown queues at the Chateau.
Every bedroom has a lavatory basin with hot and cold water, and the whole building is heated by a system of low-pressure steam radiators—at least one in every room. Again, an intimate knowledge of hotel conditions is displayed in the building of partitions solidly in hollow tiles, and floors of concrete, making for completely soundproof rooms.
The Main Trunk and National Park. Told By the Camera. — The Chateau, Tongariro National Park, North Island, New Zealand. — (Rly. Publicity photo.) — Mt. Ngauruhoe (7,515 ft.) seen through the window at the Chateau. — Justly famous is the Finest Walk in the World (to Milford Sound). At the Chateau Tongariro is the Finest Window in the World, framing Ngauruhoe, New Zealand’s Fuji Yama. All that the sacred mountains of other countries offer in sublimity, and all the might and magic inherent in a live breathing volcano, are here found. The great Ruapehu-Tongariro mountain mass, snow-crowned, mother of rivers that run north, south, and to all points of the compass, is the heart of the North Island. The railway has brought the Tongariro National Park within a few hours of the average North Islander’s home
A Place of Enchantment… — Tongariro National Park The New Zealand Railways Magazine, (June 1, 1940)
National Park is a national all-theyear-round recreation resort which too many New Zealanders fail to appreciate. Its attraction as a snowsport centre in the season is undisputed, but when I said that I would be there for the greater part of my annual holiday, the almost horrified reaction of dozens of people was, without exception, “But what on earth will you Do there in the summer?” Two added scornfully: desolate, colourless spot!”
“That
Desolate and colourless? I gasped. A place that is drenched in subtleties of colour for those with eyes to see: eddies of low, purpletinted flowers against the tawny brown of the plains; masses of white-flowering shrubs lying like drifts of snow on the silent hillsides; the sudden warmth of golden broom flaring against grey boulders; starry patches of mountain daisies standing primly on silver stems beside silver-white rapids; exquisitely-tiny white bells swinging blue-tipped petals on thin brown stalks above beds of deep green moss, heads of creamy bells with their stems tinged with rosered, or clusters of four-petalled golden-stamened flowers with green leaves closing compactly up beneath them and tight buds packed securely in the centre. Of all the hundreds of folk who flock down for the exhilaration of the winter sports, how many realise how much they are missing by not seeing the Park in summer time, when so many of its diverse
attractions are visible and accessible as they never are during Park,” describes these attractions in the following words: the winter? James Cowan, in his exceedingly “Steaming craters, sulphurous pits, well-written and well-informed a boiling lake, ice-cold lakes, book, “The Tongariro National glaciers, snowfields, alpine slopes, 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 the Tongariro Park is almost to make a catalogue of all New Zealand's landscapes.” Even a casual stroll up the metal road of the mountain gives
glimpses which are superb; a dazzle of white at a corner as Ruapehu comes into sight, its massive shoulder thrusting into the burning blue sky; on the right the beeches dropping down the hillside in tiers and conveying, through the wide spacing of their boughs and the smallness of their leaves, an indescribable quality of light and airy loveliness; on the way back, a different vista as the great cone of Ngauruhoe soars into the sky, its grey flanks striped with long claws of snow. From the Chateau itself the panorama is rich with colour: dull green of the beech woods, tawny gold of the rolling hills; emerald green of the golf course slashing the landscape like a sword; dim brown of the plains broken by a range of hills as deeply-blue as a bird's wing. Far off, the flat-topped distinctive outline of Hikurangi. In the distance, tier on tier of further hills, merging from smoky-blue
into grey-blue, from grey-blue into living rainhow with it to the pool silver-blue, from silver-blue into below. the silver pallor of the skyline. Of a certainty, delicate beauty and Or let the “no colour” critics take a rugged grandeur dwell side by side walk to the Waiuku Gorge, starting in this domain of 149,700 acres, through the beeches where the path where “almost all New Zealand's is dappled with shifting light and landscapes” meet and mingle shade, where a cold, clear stream alone, a widely-travelled English cascades over boulders that its scientist whom we met said that it minerals have painted a bright was a unique and “super-special golden-brown; through the open sight” which no one should dare to country and up a hillside till a miss. Mr. Cowan's description of fantastic outcrop of grey-black the Crater, as usual, cannot be rock gives a look-out over the excelled. Here it is: Gorge. “The last-born of the craters which Sheer below the rock face, the once discharged lava within the delicate airiness of the beeches walls of this basin of black scoria slants steeply down, the leaves of rock and cinders is the still active the trees directly below glistening Red Crater—a mouth of glowing in the sun as though each one were colour set round with jagged rocks, plated in pure silver. To the left, the and venting hot sulphur and acidriver, far above the Gorge, gouges laden steam and strange noises, a narrow passage through the rock- and fearful pulsings and thumpings cliff and hurls a veil of water down, from the depths of the volcano. This down to the heart of the valley Red Crater is 600 feet above the below—to thread the silver-grey floor of the main crater and is boulders together with a ribbon of about a quarter of a mile across. quicksilver, while on the farther The scoria forming the sides is hillside a half-hidden waterfall is a wonderfully coloured in red, white flash behind a screen of lacy orange, blue, yellow and black, green. with bright yellow sulphur incrustations….” Or, at the Taranaki Falls, let the critics again watch a river fling No wonder Maori legends, as Mr. itself through a narrow chasm in Cowan says, embody weird stories the rock face and, thundering of “the multitudes of genii and downwards in the light, carry a demons with which the native imagination
Looking across the golf links towards the Chateau Tongariro. Mt. Ruapehu in the background. (Govt. Publy. photo). peoples this wild gale-swept region resounding with strange and terrifying noises, alive with the smoke and the steam and the fiery valleys of the volcanoes.” The origin of the name Ngauruhoe as related in Mr. Cowan's book is interesting: “When Ngatoro reached the foot of the range now known as Tongariro, he decided to ascend it in order to spy out the country, like the modern surveyor.” He was, however, caught in a snowstorm, “a new and terrible experience for an immigrant from the tropical isles of the ocean. In his extremity he prayed for the fire of the gods.
“His priestess sisters heard him and appealed to the fire-demons, Te Pupu and Te Hoata, who sent the saving fire. The flames of life burst on the peak-top and his body gained warmth and he was saved. The words ‘riro’ (carried away or seized) and ‘tonga’ (south wind) in his prayer to the goddesses were the origin of the name Tongariro… When Ngatoro-i-rangi put forth his prayer, he slew a female slave as an offering to the gods. This slave, who was a personal attendant and food bearer, was named Auruhoe. When the god-sent flames of life burst forth Ngatoro threw the body of the slave into the blazing crater and that was how the volcano came to bear its name…” Very interesting to the pakeha, but most unfortunate for poor Auruhoe, who had to pay the price of death for the perpetuation of her name!
There are variations of this legend, of course, just as there are variations of the tale of Egmont, Pihanga, and Ruapehu. Mr. Cowan, retelling one tale, says that in the old days: “…. An assemblage of great mountains stood in the heart of the North Island. Like gods they stood there…. Tongariro was chief of them all, but… lofty snow-topped Taranaki stood there … and there also stood Tauhara and Putauaki” (now called by the pakehas Edgecumbe). “They were males, all these mountains; they were gods and warriors—all except one, who was a female. Her name was Pihanga… and these mountains loved Pihanga and each wished her to become his wife. But the one she favoured most was Tongariro” (Tongariro and Ngauruhoe being regarded as one). “He won her by fierce combat; he turned upon the other mountains and forced them to
depart. He fought them and were slaughtered, and their bodies defeated them; Pihanga was his… were laid out side by side on the rocks and tussock. This level array “And the defeated mountains of corpses was compared to a flat debated among themselves whither rock or table…” they should go.” Tauhara and Putauaki decided on the Bay of The story of the Haunted Whare Plenty, Taranaki” the setting-place also has its source in fact. In the of the sun.” early days when sheep-stocking was being attempted in the All one night they travelled. At mountain country, a Maori daylight Taranaki halted at the shepherd, by name Wi Takerei, west coast, where he stands now was found dead on the floor of a under the name of Mt. Egmont. slab whare built near the waterfall Tauhara and Putauaki travelled on the Whakapapanui, one of his north, Putauaki, halted by the eyes being missing. “The lonely dawn, standing still “at the desolate spot on which the whare northern end of the Kaingaroa stood had been regarded by the Plain, nearly a hundred miles from Maoris as haunted by the ghost of his original standing place.” a young woman who had come to a Tauhara, however, was “the violent end near there, and now the slowest of the three rejected lovers. He travelled with tardy, lingering steps; he paused many times to look back towards Pihanga, whom he was leaving. And when daylight came and stopped his march he had only reached the place where he stands now, near the shores of Taupo Moana. And he ever looks back across the lake at beautifull Pihanga.” Taranaki mythology differs, and as Mr. Cowan points out, there is a remarkable similarity in this kind of animistic symbolism between the mountain folk-tales of New Zealand and those of Java and Sumatra, an ethnic likeness that he does not think has been noted previously. Of the place names round the Park, one which owes its origin to actual history is that of Whakapapa—“to lay out flat-like boards or flat rock.” “On the upper parts of the Whakapapa River a battle was fought about five generations ago between Ngati-Tuwharetoa, led by Pouwhare, and a war-party of Whanganui men commanded by Manako. The Whanganui invaders were defeated and many of them
people were disposed to believe that the kehua or ghost had had something to do with the young shepherd's death.”
at the table facing the one window when suddenly the woman saw a face at the window. The apparition seemingly was that of a young Maori woman, of a handsome and fair type. The two wahines were overcome by the shock. Springall rushed outside but could see no one, and there were no tracks on the snow.” Later, after the whare had been deserted for a time, a traveller camping there for a night reported seeing the same face at the window, and an old recluse who was stationed there as a shepherd “used to say he was visited by a mysterious Mohoao woman several times.” But for a last impression of
National Park, let us make a summer-time ascent of Ruapehu. As we go up to the Salt Hut area by car, an extraordinary sight lies spread before us—the whole of the landscape right out to the horizon obscured by an immense snowfield of curling white cloud apparently frozen into immobility, the sensation of unearthliness at the sight being exactly the same as that received in a plane, when great banks of cloud below shut out the solid earth and open up another world.
The Haunted Whare now standing is not the original whare, but stands about a quarter of a mile from the site of the original hut. Soon after it was put up, “it was occupied for a time by a surveying party working around the mountains, under an assistant surveyor named Springall, who had a Maori wife. Some time in 1883, Springall and his wife and another Maori woman were snowed up in the whare. Late one Yet around us the world of valley afternoon they were playing cards and hillside, of green trees and
running water, was so clear in the early morning light that it seemed to have been purified, and the air was so thrillingly clean one wanted to taste it.
rushing down, down, down in a dizzying whirl that for sheer excitement and exhilaration would be hard to beat. And so, finally, back for late afternoon-tea in the Chateau lounge, a sun-bath on a Lilo on the big sun-balcony, a bath, dinner, dancing, music, billiards, table tennis—all the unlimited comfort and social fun of a superluxurious hostel in a national park which is a national asset, offering superb From the Ski Club hut the climb facilities for all-the-year-round recreation. really began. Up over rock faces, trudging heavy boots whose soles were lavishly bestrewn with hobnails, past a waterfall from which the spray was cold on the lips, on up to the glacier, where only the slip-slip of footsteps in the snow broke the silence, a rhythm that became hypnotic. On and on, up and up, till the vast sweep of the glacial fields stretched pure and lovely under the morning sky, with three or four skiers making dark patterns against the background of blinding white. Then, at the summit, a stillness and whiteness so profound that it could he felt. Ice-cliffs rising from the hot lake in the crater, the white spire of Te Heuheu slashed by black lava ridges; then, lower down, as we descended, to the right the gleaming waters of Lake Taupo, beyond it the outline of “trady Tauhara.” In front, the stretch of the plains now visible, with all its nuances of rich and dim blues and greys, greens and browns, and far to the west, the great glistening cone of Egmont, soaring into the blue. Altogether a panorama that could be described only as sublime. Then the thrills of the descent—and what thrills! Taken on a “private toboggan” formed simply by sitting on the snow, clasping the hands round the lifted knees to keep the feet from impeding speed—then