It’s a long way from Lush Places to the Pongaroa Hotel. But it’s even further if I’m the one driving you there. We had had an excellent idea: wouldn’t it be fun to drive to Pongaroa – a village of some 100 people in the backblocks of Tararua district – for lunch at the Pongaroa Hotel, a country watering hole that’s been licensed to slake thirsts since the Year of our Lord, 1947?
Looking at the pub’s website, the place didn’t have what you’d call an adventurous menu, but John, who lives up the road from Lush Places and who’s the unofficial mayor in these parts, had told me it was worth the hike.
The first thing was getting there. Though it’s a hamlet so far flung the Pongaroa-ians might still be living like it was 1947, I was fully confident we would be in Pongaroa in around 11/2 hours with the aid of our car’s onboard guidance system, harnessing as it does the mysteries of global positioning.
It is now five years since I finally got myself a vehicle with an in-built GPS system, and the day I did was the day I finally relaxed about getting myself from one place to another without getting hopelessly lost.
No longer would I have to rely on trying to read maps or fiddling with a smartphone while I was driving as, sadly, Michele is not blessed with navigational abilities or smartphone smarts. I would instead be swiftly and expertly guided from one place to another by the vehicle which, in the calm, electronic voice of an Englishwoman who sounds like she doesn’t suffer fools, would tell me where to go.
From the day I got the Ford, I knew there would be no repeat of that time I got so lost on Auckland’s North Shore I swore I’d never go back there.
‘This looks a bit odd,” I said to Michele. About 20 minutes out from Pongaroa, the GPS woman had told me to take a “slight right turn”, which I had, only to find myself on a windy metal road.
I stopped the car so we could both inspect the map screen. Yes, the car had told us to take the metal road, so who were we to argue?
I set off again, slowly, tentatively, nervously; long ago, I’d nearly crashed while driving the-then unsealed final section of the road to Cape Reinga.
As I powered up the first hill, the vehicle bucked on deep corrugated ruts, and as we rounded the first curve, the road quickly narrowed to little more than one lane, often with a cliff on one side and a drop on the other. Still, according to the guidance guru, it was only 9km, so it would soon be over.
After 5 or 6km on the narrow, gravel road – now a nightmare of endless blind corners, subsided sections and sudden drops – the GPS guidance suddenly stopped giving us data. Michele checked her phone: no coverage.
“Should we go on?” she said, gripping the door handle.
“Well, it’s only about another 3km,” I muttered, panicking.
As we rounded another blind corner, the view opened up a bit. A shearing shed was on the right, and on the left was a bloke on a four-wheel motorbike with his four, small tamariki in tow.
“Is this the way to Pongaroa?” we called out to him as he stopped the bike so the kids could open a gate. “You’d be better off turning around,” he said. “The road gets rough from here.”
“What? Rougher than this?”
“Yeah. I don’t think it’s even open any more.” Then he laughed, and we turned around.
Back home, after a very average lunch at the Pongaroa Hotel, I made a mental note to find my old AA book of road maps. Because the next time that snooty Englishwoman who lives in the car orders me to take a “slight right turn” onto a road to nowhere, I’ll be getting a second opinion.
