KATHY WEBB
It's taken a lot of people by surprise.
Wairoa, more noted for economic depression and the antics of gun-happy gangs, is on a roll.
"It's a boom town now," says one local.
Wry exaggeration aside, his comment nevertheless sums up what many in the northern Hawke's Bay town are feeling - that things are getting cracking again.
Wairoa, with a district population of 8900 at the last census, sits astride the Wairoa River. A wide, majestic body of water gliding through the centre of town, the river is a magnet not just to locals, but to visitors, who sit with good coffee outside the town's champion-pie-making bakery on Marine Parade, and gaze at the sparkling waters.
Whitebaiters can park outside the shops and climb down the bank with their nets to catch dinner, while children play on the grass or the climbing frames near the old Portland Island lighthouse, a beacon beside the main bridge.
The river passes the rowing club, the Affco meatworks on its northern bank, the yacht club, and houses nestling in its elbow as it rounds Spooner's Point across the road from the town's tennis courts.
From there it heads down to the coast at Whakamahi, where it forces its way out through a treacherous sandbar and into the Pacific Ocean.
Just like the river on a calm, sunny day, the pace of life in Wairoa is laid-back. But just like the river on a calm, sunny day, there are snags below the surface. Wairoa is on State Highway 2, 115km north of Napier. Not that far in terms of kilometres, but half a world away in terms of access.
Publicity material still touts Wairoa nostalgically as "the way New Zealand used to be". Certainly, its main access road is the way New Zealand used to be. The long-neglected, hilly and winding Napier-Wairoa road belongs in another era.
Designed to be navigated at low speed, with few passing lanes, and frequent landslides along its route, it becomes an ordeal of car-sick children for holidaying families, and a test of nerve for the drivers of logging, stock and fuel trucks that meet in either of the two virtually single-lane gorges.
An element of excitement is added by frustrated drivers who cannot bear to take a 35km/h corner at less than 100km/h, and the dangerously impatient who overtake on double yellow lines and corners. The road is undoubtedly one of the biggest barriers to Wairoa's development and longer-term prosperity.
FEATURE: Wairoa - on the rise after a rough journey
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.