Heading North over the Desert Road

Wednesday 30 July

From Marton we kept moving north along SH1 through Taihape (Gumboot Capital on NZ) & Mangaweka (home of the lovely Duke's Roadhouse) and stopped at Waiouru for lunch and to visit the National Army Museum.

Tracing the history of NZ wars & military actions since the Māori wars of the nineteenth century the exhibits covered so many aspects of the military from a display of WW1 prosthetics through a scarf knitted by Queen Victoria to an unopened commemorative bottle of champagne. The Pounamu Memorial Wall was beautiful and friends & whanau of fallen soldiers were encouraged to lay poppy crosses along the base of it.

I loved the eclectic nature of the collection and the fact that other nations were acknowledged too - with displays about Japanese, German, Italian, military alongside the Anzacs, NZ soldiers and Maori battalion. The dioramas were very well constructed and I loved the weird and wonderful things like a compass disguised in a button, the enamel cup for distributing grog, the evolution of prosthetics, contemporary war cartoons (if you can't laugh, what can you do?), toys made by POWs and a very fancy feathery Italian military hat!

There was a dress up room (mainly for kids and school groups I reckon, but luckily lots of the outfits were adult size!) - so we had to model a look or two! I think my 1986 army jacket was nicer than their model; the helmets were all enormous and we like to call the montage "Now you see me, now you don't!"

We continued north, across the Desert Road, passing the summit rest where we had camped on the way down in December.

We dropped down off the plateau into Turangi. Louis had a swim in the local pool and I perused the very fine Hospice op shop.

Parked up at the Turangi NZMCA park and settled in to deal with admin & binge more “Ludwig”!