Te Urewera National Park, New Zealand

Advantages: Superb scenery, ecological and ethnic interest
Disadvantages: Hard to reach and even harder to explore

Te Urewera is one of the largest and most scenically spectacular of New Zealand’s thirty-eight national and forest parks. It is also one of the least visited by tourists. The reason for this can only be because Te Urewera isn’t on the way to anywhere, unless you count the remote and sparsely populated corner of the North Island to which my friend John B has eccentrically retired, though his emailed directions on how to reach him put even that in ...
...the map (see below). Te Urewera doesn’t look far off the beaten track, being only about 50 kilometres from Rotorua, which we intended to visit anyway but where we didn’t really want to stay, since it has the reputation of being a tourist trap. We looked on the internet for somewhere to stay on the way up from Rotorua towards Te Urewera. Nothing was apparent. But the map showed a town called Murupara ideally situated on the threshold of the national ... Read review