CHATEAU TONGARIRO

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 504, 6 November 1928, Page 8

CHATEAU TONGARIRO

rIE restless spirits that brood over the volcanic summits in the centre of the North Island will stir uneasily if the plans for Chateau Tongariro, to be erected on a commanding' site in the National Park, are communicated to them in full. Resenting the intrusion of the modern refinements the big chateau will represent, they may call down the aid of those grim supernatural allies which made them so feared by the Maoris of another day. But we in the twentieth century take little heed of the ghosts that haunt the mountain tops, and if Ngaurulioe happens to send up a menacing shot or two, or a wild alpine storm rages round the Georgian facade of the chateau, the elderly gentlemen in plus fours or dinner suits will not attribute the visitation to the supernatural unless they happen to be in a particularly psychic frame of mind. Others who may dislike the creation of a huge red-brick pile will he those rugged souls who delight in taking their pleasures with the maximum amount of hardihood. To these people half the charm of the National Park in the past has been its almost complete lack of those facilities and refinements which civilisation demands in the sacred interests of its comfort. The rude tin huts have been their castles, their playground the rocky slopes and the snow. If these true mountaineers contemplate Chateau Tongariro dolorously as the beginning of the end of their pleasant, primitive isolation, they are taking a dismal view. Rather than the beginning of the end, the chateau —so happily conceived, but so incongruously named—will be but a lone outpost of ease and comfort. The mountaineers will still have all the wilderness on the eastern side of the mountain, and many leagues besides, as the field for their perspiring endeavour. The life and laughter and music of the chateau will be lost beyond a radius of one hundred yards or so. But without spoiling in any way the grandeur of the surroundings, the chateau will be the means of letting many more people enjoy them. It will throw open the attractions of the National Park to a new multitude; it will give hundreds of holiday-makers, Aucklanders included, a new playground. To the restfulness of modern service and appointments it will add the colossal sideshow of Ngauruhoe. There may' even he some spirits thrown in for good -