Traveller's Tales

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 524, 8 July 1949, Page 21

Traveller's Tales

ISITORS from abroad are often impressed by the average New Zealander’s capacity ~ travel. We think nothing of covering couple of hundred miles over a week-end to visit friends, while a night spent on the train from Auckland to Wellington is a mere bagatelle to most of our hardened voyageurs. In a series of talks recorded under the title A Traveller’s Tales, Guy Young of Christchurch says what he thinks of New Zealanders as travellers, and describes what he saw during an exténsive journey he made recently through both islands. He thinks we are lucky to be in a country where, if we want to go from Christchurch to Northland, say, we don’t have to cross frontiers or pass customs barriers or engage » ourselves helplessly with a foreign language, or endure a train for a week, bumping over steppes, dust bowls, or prairies. His own journey began with a 50mile trip from Christchurch to Akaroa, and it continued through South Canterbury and the McKenzie, country to Otago. "The sights, sounds, and smells of Wanaka remain," he says, "long after Central Otago has been exchanged for a wet week in Invercargill, where milkmen are human, and where you feel you might settle for life." Later, he went from Christchurch to Whangarei in the space of a Saturday morning. "The Waipoua Forest is by-passed," he said of this second journey, "and at Waitangi you are not taken to see the Treaty site. But there are other things

in the country north of Whangarei: valleys full of the tropics, the light gold barefoot beaches, the milk-soft air, and the names, the ancient Maori poet names we casually murder every day." The series would not be complete, of course, without some thoughts on Auck-land-"too big to be friendly-too easygoing to care whether it’s friendly or not’-and on Wellington-‘people do live there, sometimes for years on end." The first of A Traveller’s Tales will be heard from 3YA at 7.15 p.m. on Friday, July 15, and the others at the same time on succeedings Fridays.