Let's Go For a Walk.

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 98, 19 January 1935, Page 6

Let's Go For a Walk.

JOHNSONVILLE TO OHARIU Away From the Sea Just below the Johnsonville church the motorists’ yellow sign points the way to Ohariu. Half an hour’s winding climb brings the wayfarer to the top of the hill and the wide vista of rolling golden hills, far mountain tops and table lands; tiny upland farms, each with its sheltering grove, are scattered sparsely about. The road dips' gently down to the secluded longsettled upland valley, passing gardencircled homesteads and blowy grassy lands till the cross-roads at Ohariu are reached. Above tlie row of home-made letter-boxes belonging to distant farms the yellow post blackly signifies “no exit to left or right.” The right hand road we know of old. It goes peacefully past two small old churches each with their grass-grown grave yards; the tomb-stones bearing dates and names of early days; past cosy farm houses, accompanied much of the way by a gay little river. This same river reaches within a mile of the sea, only to find a rampart of cliff So hard that even its age-long energy is beaten and it turns back to roach by tortuous miles tlie sea at Makara. However, to-day we take the left-hand road. Past an aspen-shaded house the stony road soon changes to a wide grass cart track and our city-tired feet welcome the delightfully springy surface. Through a gate across an almost dry river bed ami we are returning by the old road to Johnsonville. In the narrow gorge here the power house is situated, but before electricity came water works and a dam were erected at this spot and some relics are still half-buried there. As we follow our grass road round the hills the foreground has quite an English flavour; but the steep fierce jagged-peaked hills close in and spell New Zealand very plainly. Even in this sultry weather the wind at the pass blows chill and keen. ■ Coming down the Johnsonville side our grassy track passes two longdeserted sites of homesteads. Judging by the huge macrocarpas these must have been old settled homes; one wonders why they were forsaken. Perhaps because of the same chill wind. Across the valley the modern houses are empty and forlorn, so that the healthy potato patch and flowery garden of the first inhabited house is a welcome sight. Across the railway line past the cattle yards and the Tail-Waggers’ Home and we are on the main road again. Then an odd fact strikes us. Although the road has climbed and dipped and climbed again for two and a-half hours’ walk never once has it glimpsed the seA.—OF NO MEAN CITY.