We're needing a decent stop every 30-40km & fortunately rural Nz happens to place a village or small town at roughly these intervals. That means a coffee & pie stop. Unfortunately the pies are slow nutritional suicide - only one good home made pie so far - and represent absolutely the triumph of optimism over experience.
It also creates the opportunity for a museum stop. In the 70 mile bush stretch of the Wairarapa between Napier and Wellington each small community has it's pioneer museum. Run by volunteers and filled with the bric a brac, photos, & farm tools of theirs 5th & 6th generation forebears. British crown interests in the 1840s and 1850s decided that NZ was ripe for economic development and that money was to be made in the process. They set about encouraging a largely Scandinavian migration to this area. These folk were regarded as Christian hard working and used to forests!! They were lured by subsidised passage , the promise of 40 acre plots of pastoral idyll ( paintings of rolling pastures were part of the marketing. ) They walked in from Napier to find dense bushland and a wet & snowy spring. The New Zealand Company had bought the land from local Maori chiefs for a shilling an acre (The local tribes, under threat from neighbouring warring tribes were keen for European protection). In only one of several ways the Company swindled the Maoris. It sold the land to the settlers for a pound an acre plus 3 years of indentured labour to build roads & rail tracks. Only the hardy & determined managed to survive.
Sandra, who we stayed with in Gisborne works as a midwife in an area with a high Maori population (60%). She wasn't the first to tell us how badly Maori do. They die younger, have babies younger and more of them and have big problems with alcohol, mental health and domestic violence. She is part way through a 12 month course in Maori cultural studies. "They are so angry. Really angry."