I reached Taumarunui at dawn (7am) to a crowing competition from the town's roosterageses. Now, I'm a city boy and I haven't much interest in small North Island farming towns, so I stopped for a pie then headed off to State Highway 43: The Forgotten World Highway! Can't remember why it's called that, of course. It runs from Taumarunui to Stratford and nobody ever needs to go between these two places AND YET it's a full blown state highway and is graded and surfaced as such.
The way I think of it is: it's a six metre wide cycleway where you're very occasionally interrupted by powered vehicular traffic. The farming in this part of the country is mostly dry cattle, not dairy, so it's mostly stock trucks as opposed to milk tankers.
At first, there were more hills than cars. Then there were more landslips than cars. Then more dead possums than cars. By the time I got halfway, to the border between western Ruapehu district and eastern Stratford district, I was coasting down beautifully graded, picture-perfect country roads with my arms stuck out pulling a bunch of yoga stretches. Very nice. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
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