We were to sleep in this beautiful valley, hemmed in by mountains that would keep their watch over us through the long night hours. How romantic and charming it sounded, and what prosaic discomfort there was in the reality!
The inn consisted of one living room, where the village smoked and drank. A ladder staircase led to a loft roughly partitioned off into bedrooms, where every sound through the whole length of the passage could be heard. Seven men, with their colley dogs, driving sheep from Auckland to Napier, arrived after us, and had to be accommodated, so the gentlemen slept that night three in one room.
I am bound to say that these small inns are perfectly clean, and that the fare, if homely, is substantial. There is always a good joint of meat (and the beef in New Zealand is the best I have ever eaten), with vegetables and bread and cheese, or sometimes a more ambitious attempt in the way of jam tartlets or rice pudding. But it seems quite extraordinary that there should be no cows in villages where there is such abundance of rich pasture, and that we should find everywhere in use the "Anglo-Swiss Condensed," and tinned butter.
The next morning we were on the road again by 6 a.m., and in the midst of the grand mountain scenery of the previous night. It was one succession of toiling up mountains for three hours, to rush down on them on the other side in half an hour. In the course of the day we crossed no less than two distinct ranges--the Hukiuni, or Great Head, and the Maunyaharuru, or Rumbling Mountains. It was weary work this crawling up the side of these, each zigzag bringing us so many feet higher up, to lose again by the descent what we had but just so painfully gained.
One scene among many others impressed itself vividly on my mind that day. It was soon after we started, when we had climbed some height above Tarawera, that I looked back to a low range of pine-covered hills leading up to some rocky mountain tops. Immediately beneath there was a green common, with some white specks, that was the village of Tarawera. Some bare, stony headlands closed in this first gorge. Then looking from the mountain, on to the sides of which the coach was hanging, down the precipice below, the eye on the opposite side followed upwards, upwards from the dense, blue mist to the thick vegetation, and beyond to the grey, stony patches of the highest peaks, shot with a pinky grey.