New Zealand Tour Will Take You Down An Abandoned Rail Line In A Golf Cart

There isn’t much left of the towns once kept alive by nearby coal mines and sawmills, but that’s part of the tour’s charm.

It’s not often that you get the chance to ride a modified golf cart down an abandoned railway line that runs past more ghosts than towns. But hopping off the cart in the middle of rolling farmland and being mobbed by a herd of Holsteins is even more surreal.

What seemed like a photo-op on an 83-kilometre trip across New Zealand’s North Island turned into a close encounter of the bovine kind thanks to our guide, Maree Matena. All it took was a few shouts from her of “come here, ladies,” and they came running, first a curious few and then a black-and-white horde that pushed their faces through the wire fence, licking fingers and mooing for handouts.

The rail line and the cows — plus a few thousand sheep and a handful of goats and wild pigs — are part of Forgotten World Adventures, a way for tourists to see this remote part of the North Island and relive its troubled history.

The Stratford to Okahukura railway line was meant to be a vital link between the farms, sawmills and coal mines of the Taranaki and Ruapehu regions to markets in the rest of the country. It took more than 30 years to build and cost £2.5 million (then the country’s legal tender) — a fortune in today’s dollars.