When you drive through the Bay of Plenty
region on State Highway 2, you can't miss
Katikati, SH2 passes right through it. It's
a small town decorated with many murals,
largely of the town's history, and other
outdoor art that sets it apart from other
towns along the way. So it is well worth
a stop and a look-around.
There is a large range of accommodation on
offer, chiefly in the surrounding rural area,
from backpacker style to top-of the range
luxury. The Katikati Visitor Centre in town
can advise, but does not handle bookings.
Katikati is a rapidly growing centre of close-to-nature attractions that appeal to many people in the region as well as to travellers from overseas. The Bird Gardens, a little way south of town, for example, and Lansdowne Lavender in the same general area, a farm property just off the main road that specialises in lavender and lavender products.
As well, Katikati is the base for many walking tracks, varying from energetic to easy, in the native bush-clad foothills of the Kaimai Range west of the town. There are two craft shops, both at the lower end of the main street opposite the Talisman Hotel.
The Maori Arts and Crafts Centre offers a wide range of notable items large and small, many done in traditional Maori carving styles. The other, an artists' co-operative, has an enormous variety of craftwork, all produced by locals of the town and district.
The town also has several good restaurants, notably Twickenham, operating in an historical homestead in a long-established wooded garden within the town limits, The Landing at the unmistakeable Talisman Hotel in the main street, and, a little to the south on the main road, the restaurant, notable for its huge brick fireplace at the Morton Estate Winery. Morton Estate, marked by a building of unusual South African design clearly seen from SH2, also offers wine-tasting and sales quite separate from the restaurant, which is in its own premises on the estate.
Katikati has an unusual history. It was originally the idea of late 19th Century Irishman George Vesey Stewart, who organised a land purchase from the local Maori people, and is still remembered as the town's founder. He is pictured, appropriately larger than life, in one of the main street murals. He arranged three immigration voyages from Ireland in the 1870s and the descendants of many of those families are still in the area and remembered in street names.
The immigrant ships are memorialised in the
names of Carisbrooke St and Jocelyn St. Carisbrooke
St refers to the Carisbrooke Castle, a ship
named for the castle on England's Isle of
Wight. The vessel is also remembered in Dunedin
in the South Island, where Carisbrook (without
an ``e'') is the city's main sports stadium.
The life-sized history scenes painted building
walls tell of the town's early days, mainly
farming and logging as well as Katikati development
as a rural service centre over its first
100 years.
The siting of the town is directly related to the Uretara River, which allowed access by water up the harbour from Tauranga to the south. But eventually there was a muddy road, improved in stages over the years, until these days it takes a bare half-hour to make the trip by car.
Now Katikati is growing rapidly, with a role as a commuter town for Tauranga, as a retirement location, and still as a farm service base. But the farming has changed hugely. Only 50 years ago, when New Zealand was, in economic terms, an off-shore market place for the United Kingdom, the land all about was devoted almost exclusively to dairying, an industry aimed largely at producing butter for the British market.
Now big acreages are planted in kiwifruit, while avocado orchards are spreading rapidly as export markets develop. A lot more land is taken up with 'lifestyle'' blocks, residential small holdings, many producing various crops and products, some not.
The growing volume of traffic using SH2 became a major problem for the town, especially with large numbers of trucks heading to and from the burgeoning Port of Tauranga. This explains the murals and other outdoor art. In 1990, there seemed a very real possibility that a main road bypass would soon be built, taking the traffic around the town. The proposal raised fears that Katikati would wither economically without the through-traffic, and the mural project started as a way of making Katikati a destination worth visiting. The concept was borrowed from the Canadian town of Chemainus on Vancouver Island.
But the bypass proposal then got put on the back-burner by the Government's roading authority and, so far, the bypass still hasn't happened. Nevertheless, the group responsible for the murals, Katikati Outdoor-Art, continued its work, with such projects as the Haiku Path. This, down from the main street to the river, across a bridge and along the riverbank, marked all the way by large boulders with verses in the very brief, Japan-derived haiku poetry form. You can get a leaflet from the Katikati Visitor Information Centre to guide you on a walk-around of the murals.
The group also commissioned the life-sized fibreglass figure of "Barry -- a Kiwi bloke" seated permanently on a park bench right in the middle of town. The sight of visitors being photographed standing behind Barry or sitting next to him is now commonplace. The newspaper-reading Barry figure is worth spotting, because it is almost right in front of the Visitor Information Centre, a must-visit office with enormous amounts of information about the town and district, and staffed at least six days a week.