Taranaki, New Zealand, where the hardcore people live
December 30th 2011 08:32
Just before we set off to explore Taranaki last October, we passed a large grey bus in a Wellington car park. Neatly written at the top of its windscreen was the following boast
“God created Taranaki so the Hardcore people would have somewhere to live”
We’d barely entered the region when the rain began to fall. It soon became a thick grey curtain, impenetrable even with the headlights on high beam. We pulled over and waited. The rain was relentless. It was hardcore. I peered into the obscurity. What kind of country lay beyond this blanket of hard, driving rain? How hard exactly were the hardcore people who lived here? I was soon to find out.
Within a few minutes, dim figures broke from the watery wall ahead and ran swiftly towards us. As they came closer they took shape as children, bare-headed, bare-footed, in t- shirts and shorts, bags bouncing on their backs. School was out and its pupils were on their way home. They were definately hardcore
When the road had cleared of kids and the rain had eased to a thin veil, we drove on. Thick bands of water were spilling down the steep banks on either side of the road; it was fast becoming a river. We eased cautiously on ahead of it, past farms of an unbelievable green, through dying towns where the ruins of once flourishing dairy factories and freezing works huddled on the outskirts and abandoned shops lined the empty streets, on to New Plymouth. In more clement weather we might have lingered and explored, stopped to photograph the Aotea canoe at Patea, to have a beer in the grand old hotel at Waverley, to admire Taranaki Maunga from afar or to follow a signpost up one of hundreds of enticing side roads, but we were driven on by the relentless rain and the threat of an even worse storm waiting just offshore. This was, without a doubt, hardcore country.
“God created Taranaki so the Hardcore people would have somewhere to live”
The Taranaki Bus
We’d barely entered the region when the rain began to fall. It soon became a thick grey curtain, impenetrable even with the headlights on high beam. We pulled over and waited. The rain was relentless. It was hardcore. I peered into the obscurity. What kind of country lay beyond this blanket of hard, driving rain? How hard exactly were the hardcore people who lived here? I was soon to find out.
Within a few minutes, dim figures broke from the watery wall ahead and ran swiftly towards us. As they came closer they took shape as children, bare-headed, bare-footed, in t- shirts and shorts, bags bouncing on their backs. School was out and its pupils were on their way home. They were definately hardcore
The wild Taranaki coast
When the road had cleared of kids and the rain had eased to a thin veil, we drove on. Thick bands of water were spilling down the steep banks on either side of the road; it was fast becoming a river. We eased cautiously on ahead of it, past farms of an unbelievable green, through dying towns where the ruins of once flourishing dairy factories and freezing works huddled on the outskirts and abandoned shops lined the empty streets, on to New Plymouth. In more clement weather we might have lingered and explored, stopped to photograph the Aotea canoe at Patea, to have a beer in the grand old hotel at Waverley, to admire Taranaki Maunga from afar or to follow a signpost up one of hundreds of enticing side roads, but we were driven on by the relentless rain and the threat of an even worse storm waiting just offshore. This was, without a doubt, hardcore country.
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