South Wairarapa a heartland delight

Two hundred and fifty two steps to the lighthouse at Cape Palliser.

In the lexicon of Wellington, "Wairarapa" stands for everything good about the weekend. It's sunshine and bush, lakes and beaches, farmland and vineyards. And when you get sick of the outdoors you can take your pick of country towns along the way.

Featherston's the first stop after the haul over the Rimutaka Ranges.

"How long have you got?" asks George in the Fell Locomotive Museum on the main street. Glasgow-born, he volunteers at the museum every weekend. He and Jim sit me down with a documentary about the Featherston to Wellington railway and the Fell engines that hauled trains up the Rimutaka Incline. It's impressive and touching, this old footage of ordinary people making history. If you want to feel better about your job, try watching a guy shovel coal non-stop into a furnace, bent over and half suffocating.

The world's last Fell engine takes centre stage. Gifted to Featherston after the Rimutaka Tunnel replaced the railway in the 1950s, it sat for 20 years until a grant and local volunteers restored it to award-winning condition. It's rigged up to electricity, and Jim and George get it running and explain the mechanics patiently to a series of rapt little boys and their parents.

If the railway kick-started Featherston, war defined it. A huge military camp just outside town trained more than 30,000 soldiers during WWI, and in WWII it was used as a detention centre for Japanese prisoners. In 1943, after a standoff with guards, 48 prisoners were shot dead and 61 were wounded. Japanese veterans still visit a memorial nearby. Among the displays at the Heritage Museum are small artworks by prison inmates, mostly in traditional Japanese style.

On my way out, the guy behind the counter tries to sell me a "How to be a good wife" tea towel. Fair enough, too; I've already bought some rhubarb and raspberry jam and an "I've been to Featherston" pen.

Tonight I'm staying 40km down the Western Lake Road at Te Rakau Cabins. Beyond the long silver smudge of Lake Wairarapa, there are green paddocks and clumps of totara and cabbage trees and hills pressed between blue mountain ranges. Everything under the sun has an iridescent beetle shine. The last bit of unsealed road silences Johnny Cash mid-way through Folsom Prison Blues. Someone's started their own rabbit-proof fence with a collection of stuffed toys impaled on the wire - it's sweet, in a distressing kind of way.

Between Lake Onoke and Ocean Beach, two wooden railway cabins lie snugly together in a paddock. Kitchen and shower in one, beds for four in the other, deck out front and toilet in between. The guest-book's full of praise for the tramping, the birdlife, the shower pressure and the friendly pig and donkey over the fence.

From here it's about an hour and a half's drive to Cape Palliser, backtracking through farmland and bush reserves and then down Whatarangi Bluff to the smoky opal sea. Beyond the Lake Ferry turnoff you can camp and walk to Putangirua Pinnacles - a city of broken teeth eroded from gravel screes that poured on to the coast seven million years ago. The Aorangi Range was an island then, and rocks in the riverbed hold fossil shells.

Further along the deteriorating coast road, little communities of baches and boats are strewn defiantly above the tideline. Nothing new there - Maori were building sheltering stone walls in Palliser Bay in the 11th century. Among the fishing boats on the beach at Ngawi there's a tiny purple grader called Tinky Winky with saucy, stuck-on eyes. Round the corner, seals are drunk-sunbathing on the grass by the road. At Cape Palliser, I climb 252 steps to the lighthouse. Sea and sky make two halves of a sphere with all the world's remaining light pressed between them.

In the 1840s, Pakeha settlers drove livestock into Palliser Bay along the coast from Wellington. The ferry service started after someone drowned crossing Lake Onoke. The Lake Ferry Hotel was built to give the ferryman and his passengers somewhere to stay and drink. When I turn up after dark, everyone's eating fish and chips, and watching rugby. I ask for sherry and the barman dusts off the kind of blue bottle Nanna used to have and gives me change for a fiver.

Back at my cabin, everything isperfect; from the big bed to the curved wooden ceiling and the stars through the sliding doors. I hear frogs but no cars. In the night I half-wake to the donkey's sad hollering.

On Sunday morning I walk down Ocean Beach and get sea-sprayed and salt-swept and wind-dazzled and all those ocean things. A handful of baches stare down the sea with their backs to the cliff. It feels like the end of the world.