Paeroa: Best little town in the middle of everywhere

The L&P bottle, world famous in NZ. Photo / Getty Images

On our last trip back from Auckland we stayed the night in Paeroa and stopped for a look around.

Sitting on the western base of Maunga Karangahake, you can see why the pre-European settlers called the place Paeroa. Pae for perch, as in paepae, and roa - long; a long perch sitting above the swamps of the Hauraki plains. Swamps that were a food basket in the centuries before they were logged and drained.

Paeroa sits at the junction of the Ohinemuri and Waihou rivers. In 1769, on his first trip to "Nieuw Zeeland", Captain James Cook got within a few kilometres of Paeroa - as far inland as he ever got in Aotearoa.

Cook, his botanist Banks and 10 British sailors rowed up the Waihou (which he renamed the river Thames) and their descriptions of the tall, straight Gondwanaland conifers growing beside the Waihou initiated Aotearoa's first outbreak of extractive capitalism. Masts and spars of kauri, kahikatea, matai, miro and tōtara were harvested for Britain's navies - some eventually getting shot away in the Battle of Trafalgar.

Exactly one century later, at "Cashell's Landing" (named after a Lithuanian who leased a block from the Ngaati Tamateraa), a tent township of more than 1000 sprang up. Gold had been discovered in the Karangahake gorge. Paeroa's Wharf St today marks the location of Cashell's Landing where mining equipment, imported from Australia and America, was offloaded. It wasn't long before the Waihou silted up (from mining spoil dumped into the gorge) and the boats stopped coming to Wharf St. By 1900 the Karangahake mines were producing 60 per cent of New Zealand's gold.

By 1905 a railway line had been built through the Karangahake gorge and in 1978 the East Coast Main Trunk railway was diverted through the newly dug Kaimai Tunnel.

Following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis John Key's National Government initiated the New Zealand Cycle Trail to help get the economy back on its feet. The combined walkway/cycleway through the Karangahake gorge, which includes an 1100m tunnel, was one of the first sections to be built and in 2013 it was voted the most popular cycle trail in New Zealand - and now the Karangahake gorge swarms with high-vis-clad baby boomers on e-bikes.

Paeroa is also known for the soft drink L&P (Lemon and Paeroa), originally made with lemon juice and carbonated water from a natural spring in Paeroa. Bottled locally since 1906, the brand passed through the ownership of Innes Tartan before being acquired by Coca Cola and is now manufactured in Auckland - its only legacy being a large sculpture of an L&P bottle. A 1970s television advertisement for L&P featured the bottle sculpture and the Swingers' song "Counting the Beat". The L&P bottle is one of New Zealand's most photographed icons and the council has since moved it back from the road and built a whole park around it.

Paeroa is the self-proclaimed "antiques capital of New Zealand" and I picked up a travel memento of a ceramic sitting Buddha. It was at the high end of the price scale for New Zealand second-hand shops. The owner sold on behalf of teams gathering stuff on the internet and business was brisk, she told me.

Paeroa's main street features lemon trees as a street tree - an obvious reference - and their historic streetscape is remarkably intact; Paeroa businesses had resisted the construction of a Pak'nSave supermarket in their town, only for one to be built in Thames, just down the road. Despite the well intentioned retailers' efforts, shoppers drove to Thames and mainstreet businesses went the way of all small towns, I was told.

Paeroa's Primrose Hill features a memorial to the first New Zealand soldier to die fighting overseas - during the Boer War in South Africa. Paeroa's other war memorial is a replica of the London Cenotaph and during the evening the cenotaph cycles through an array of colours, visible from the town below. Primrose Hill is the highest point of "the best little town in the middle of everywhere" and from there, at night, if you stop to look around, you can see the lights of the dairy boomtowns down on the Hauraki Plains.