The Forgotten World Highway: New Zealand’s Strangest 150 km

A hundred and forty-eight kilometres, three saddles, a hand-dug tunnel called the Hobbit’s Hole, and a pub in a self-declared republic. New Zealand’s oddest road just changed, and it changed in your favour.

Nobody puts this road on a postcard

Ask somebody to name a great New Zealand road and you will get Milford, or the Crown Range, or the coast road up to Kaikōura. All excellent, all photographed to death. Nobody says State Highway 43, because most people have never heard of it and because it does not photograph in the way the South Island does. There are no turquoise lakes and no snow-capped peaks looming over the tarmac.

What there is instead is a hundred and forty-eight kilometres of narrow, twisting, half-forgotten road running between Stratford in Taranaki and Taumarunui in the King Country, through country that got left behind when the main routes went elsewhere a century ago. Ferns, gorges, papa cliffs, sheep on the tarmac, a one-lane tunnel dug by hand in the 1930s, and a village that declared itself an independent republic and has been electing livestock to the presidency ever since.

It is the strangest good road in the country and it is the reason our New Zealand motorcycle tour is called the Forgotten World.

The thing that changed in 2025

For as long as anyone can remember, SH43 had a problem: a twelve-kilometre stretch through the Tāngarākau Gorge that was gravel. Not “unsealed but fine”. Proper metal road, dust in summer, greasy in the wet, loose in the corners and prone to slipping down the hillside after heavy rain.

That was the last significant unsealed section on the entire New Zealand state highway network, and in March 2025 it was sealed. The chip-seal job through the gorge cost close to thirteen million dollars on its own, part of roughly thirty million spent on the highway overall to make it safer and more usable. When the last of it went down, an era ended: there is no longer a single metal state highway left in the country.

Purists grumbled, and they had a point. Something is lost when the last rough bit gets tidied up. But the practical effect is enormous and it is the reason we can now put a group of riders through there without a debate. Almost every rental contract in New Zealand, for cars, campervans and motorcycles alike, prohibits travel on unsealed roads. That single clause kept SH43 off itineraries for decades, because taking a hire vehicle through the gorge technically voided the agreement and any damage that came with it. Sealing the gorge did not just make the road smoother. It made it legally available to a whole category of traveller who had been quietly excluded.

Whangamōmona, the village in the middle, has mixed feelings about that. More visitors is good for the pub. Fewer people arriving covered in dust and pleased with themselves is a loss of character. Both things are true and the locals will tell you so, at length, if you buy a round.

Three saddles and a lot of gears

The road climbs three named saddles: Strathmore, Whangamōmona and Tahora. None of them is high by the standards of anywhere with real mountains, and all of them are more work than the numbers suggest, because the road does not use the gentle engineered gradients of a modern highway. It follows the terrain the way roads did when the terrain won most arguments.

What that means on a bike is constant input. Tight second and third gear corners, blind crests, camber that changes mid-bend, sections with no centre line at all and barely enough width for two vehicles to pass without one of them going onto the grass. It is not fast riding and anybody treating it as fast riding is going to meet a logging truck at exactly the wrong moment. It is engaging riding, which is a different and better thing, and three hours of it leaves you more satisfied than three hours of a wide sweeping alpine highway.

Budget properly for it. The hundred and forty-eight kilometres takes a bare minimum of two and a half hours moving, and realistically half a day once you have stopped at the tunnel, stopped at the pub, stopped at the lookouts and stopped for the flock of sheep that has decided the road belongs to it. Anybody who plans SH43 as a quick transit between two other places has misunderstood the assignment.

The Hobbit’s Hole

Fourteen kilometres past Whangamōmona the road runs at a wall of papa rock and disappears into it. The Moki Tunnel was cut in 1936, it is a hundred and eighty metres long, and it is locally known as the Hobbit’s Hole, which will tell you roughly how much headroom the original builders thought anybody needed.

It is single lane. It is unlit. It is damp, and the walls are bare rock rather than anything you would call a lining. Riding into it out of bright daylight your eyes take a couple of seconds to adjust, and those are the seconds in which you find out whether you left your sunglasses on. Slow down before the entrance rather than in it, and get your visor up on a wet day, because the temperature drop fogs it instantly.

It was raised in the 1980s to let stock trucks through, which is why the profile inside looks like somebody attacked the ceiling with a machine, because somebody did. Sound your horn on the way in if you cannot see through. Everybody local does.

The republic

Whangamōmona sits roughly in the middle of the road and it is the only real stop on it. Population is measured in dozens. There is a hotel, built in 1911, with a wooden veranda and a public bar that has not been redesigned by anybody with a mood board.

In 1989 a local government reorganisation redrew the regional boundary and moved the village out of Taranaki and into Manawatū-Whanganui. The locals, who considered themselves Taranaki people and had not been asked, responded by declaring the village an independent republic. That was thirty-seven years ago and the joke has not only survived, it has become an institution. Republic Day is held every second January, there is a presidential election, and past holders of the office have included a goat and a poodle, which is a stronger record than several actual countries can claim.

You can get your passport stamped at the hotel. It is a tourist gimmick and it is also completely charming, and the fact that it has been going since 1989 rather than being invented last year by a marketing agency makes all the difference. Have a pie. Talk to whoever is behind the bar. This is the sort of stop that a big biking tour exists to deliver and that a fly-drive holiday skips because it is not on the way to anything.

The practical stuff nobody tells you

Fuel first, because it is the one that bites. Fill up in Stratford or Taumarunui, whichever end you are starting from, and do it even if the gauge says you are fine. There is no reliable fuel between them. The gap is not enormous for a modern adventure bike with a twenty-litre tank, but it is comfortably enough to strand a smaller machine or anyone who arrived on fumes assuming a village of forty people would have a pump.

Phone signal is patchy to non-existent through the gorge and over the saddles. If your navigation lives entirely on a phone with streamed maps, download the region before you leave. This is also a genuinely good argument for the old-fashioned approach of knowing roughly where you are going, since the road has almost no junctions and getting lost requires effort.

Weather comes off Mount Taranaki at the western end and it arrives without much warning. Taranaki is one of the wettest regions in the North Island and a road cut into papa cliffs sheds slips after heavy rain, which is why the highway occasionally closes at short notice. Check before you commit to it, because the detour is long.

And watch for stock. Not as a quaint rural detail, as an actual hazard. Sheep and cattle get moved along and across this road, sometimes in numbers, and a herd rounding a blind bend toward you is a genuine reason to be riding at a pace that lets you stop in the distance you can see.

The mountain at the end of it

Ride west and SH43 delivers you into Taranaki, and if the cloud is off, the reward is one of the most improbable sights in the country: a near-perfect volcanic cone sitting on a flat green plain with nothing else around it. It looks fake. Photographers have compared it to Fuji for a century and the comparison is fair.

The mountain is called Taranaki Maunga, and in January 2025 New Zealand did something unusual with it: legislation granted the mountain legal personhood, recognising it as a legal entity with its own rights, as part of a settlement with local iwi. It is not the first landscape in the country to be given that status, and whatever you make of the legal theory, riding around the base of a mountain that is legally a person is a decent thing to think about for a couple of hours.

The Surf Highway around the coast and the roads on the mountain’s flanks make New Plymouth a proper base rather than an overnight stop, and it is where the Forgotten World day finishes on our route.

Where it sits in a fortnight of riding

On the fifteen-day New Zealand motorbike tour, SH43 comes on day three, Taupō to New Plymouth, and its placement is deliberate. Day one runs out of Auckland to the Coromandel, day two crosses to Taupō through the volcanic middle of the island, and by day three you have your legs, you are used to the bike, and you are used to riding on the left if you did not grow up doing it.

That last point matters more than people admit. Nobody should meet a one-lane tunnel and a blind saddle on their first morning in a left-hand-traffic country. Give it forty-eight hours and your instincts have flipped; the roundabouts stop being an event and the road position starts feeling natural. Then you take on the interesting stuff.

The other forgotten world, which runs on rails

Parallel to the road, and mostly invisible from it, runs one of the strangest transport stories in the country. The Stratford to Okahukura railway line was built through the same impossible terrain, opened in 1932, and carried freight until the network gave up on it. It has twenty-four tunnels and a lot of bridges, all of them cut and built by hand through the same papa rock the road struggles with.

Rather than let it rot, an operator now runs converted golf carts on the rails, taking visitors along the line and through the tunnels at walking pace. It sounds absurd. It is one of the more memorable things you can do in the North Island, precisely because the line goes through country the road cannot reach.

For a rider it is not something you fit into a riding day, but it is worth knowing about if you are building extra nights into the trip or if you have a non-riding partner along who would rather not spend six hours in a helmet. It also explains the landscape. When you understand that somebody drove a railway through this, the effort involved in the road makes more sense.

Riding on the left, if you never have

Roughly half the people who come on our New Zealand departures have never ridden in a left-hand traffic country, and SH43 is a good place to have already sorted that out rather than a good place to learn it.

The mechanics are easy. Your brain flips within about a day. What takes longer is the instinct, and the instinct fails in three specific situations. Pulling out of a car park or a fuel station, when there is no traffic to copy and your body defaults to what it has always done. Roundabouts, which run clockwise and where you give way to the right. And overtaking, where your natural sense of where the danger is comes from the wrong side.

The one that catches riders specifically is road position in a right-hand bend, which in left-hand traffic is now the bend where you want to be out toward the centre line rather than tucked in. Get that wrong and you are riding the wrong line through half the corners on the road, which on a narrow highway with blind crests is not academic.

The fix is time, and the fix is riding behind somebody who has it right. On a guided tour the road captain sets the line all day and your eyes learn it faster than your head does. By the end of day two nobody is thinking about it. That is precisely why the Forgotten World is on day three and not day one.

What sort of bike this road wants

SH43 is not technical in the off-road sense, especially now the gorge is sealed. It is technical in the sense that it is narrow, tight, and constantly changing direction, which puts a premium on a very different set of qualities from the ones that sell adventure bikes.

What helps here is a manageable weight, a bit of steering lock for the switchbacks, a comfortable riding position for three hours of constant input, and enough low-down torque that you are not hunting for gears out of every second-gear corner. What does not help is a very large, very tall, very heavy machine loaded to the roof, which will do the job but will leave you more tired than the road deserved.

It is worth thinking about because a fifteen-day motorcycle tour of New Zealand is not one kind of riding. There are long open days on fast highways where a big tourer is bliss, and there are days like this one where you would trade a hundred cc for twenty kilos any time. The compromise most riders land on is something in the middle of the adventure range, which is the same conclusion the New Zealand riders themselves have reached, judging by what you meet coming the other way on a Sunday.

Why a road nobody has heard of ends up being the day people remember

New Zealand is full of spectacular scenery and much of it comes with a car park, a viewing platform and forty people photographing the same thing. That is not a complaint, it is what happens to beautiful places, and Milford Sound is worth every one of those forty people.

The Forgotten World Highway is the opposite kind of experience. Nothing is laid on. There is no viewing platform, no interpretation panel, no coffee cart. There is a narrow road through empty hill country, a hole in a cliff, a pub with a stuffed animal behind the bar and a hundred-year-old joke about independence. You come out the other end having actually ridden something rather than having visited it, and that is the day people talk about at dinner a week later, long after the postcard views have blurred together.

It is also the reason we would rather build a guided tour around a road like this than around a checklist of the famous stops. Anybody can drive you to the famous stops.

There is a wider point in there about how the North Island gets treated on riding holidays. A lot of New Zealand itineraries land in Auckland, transit south as quickly as possible, and treat everything above Wellington as the boring bit you get through to reach the South Island. That is a mistake made by people who looked at photographs rather than maps. The volcanic plateau, the Coromandel coast, the Taranaki ring road and the Forgotten World between them make up some of the most varied riding in the country, and they do it without the traffic that the southern lakes now carry in high season.

The South Island is more spectacular. Nobody serious argues otherwise. But spectacular and enjoyable are not the same measurement, and a fair number of riders finish a fortnight here having quietly decided that the day they liked best happened four hundred kilometres north of the Cook Strait.

When to ride it

New Zealand’s seasons are upside down, which is the entire commercial logic of the trip: the southern summer runs from December to March, so a northern-hemisphere rider staring at a wet February can be on dry tarmac in shirt sleeves within twenty-four hours of leaving home.

For SH43 specifically, the shoulder months are arguably better than midsummer. Late spring and early autumn give you cooler air, fewer campervans in the tight sections, and the low light that this kind of country responds to. Taranaki gets rain in every month of the year and there is no season in which you can assume the mountain will be visible, so treat a clear day as a bonus rather than an entitlement.

Winter is the one to avoid, and not because of the road surface. It is because the days are short, the saddles get cold and greasy, and slips are more likely after sustained rain. The road stays open most of the time; it just stops being fun.

The other thing the calendar does is bring the pub to life. Republic Day at Whangamōmona falls every second January and it turns a village of a few dozen people into an event with several thousand visitors, gumboot throwing, sheep racing and a presidential election. If your dates happen to land on it, that is a very good day to be on this road. If they do not, you get the quiet version, which most riders prefer anyway.

Riding New Zealand for real

Our fifteen-day New Zealand ride runs Auckland to Christchurch, taking in the Coromandel, the volcanic plateau, the Forgotten World Highway, Taranaki, the Cook Strait ferry, the West Coast, the Southern Alps passes, Queenstown, Milford Sound and the run home through the Mackenzie Country. Small group, road captain, support vehicle, hotels and everything else sorted, and a fleet chosen for roads exactly like SH43 rather than for motorway comfort.

If a fortnight in the southern hemisphere sounds like the right antidote to a northern winter, have a look at the 15-day New Zealand Forgotten World tour, or check the tour dates page for the current season. Message us on WhatsApp if you want to know which departure gets the best weather window, because in New Zealand that question has a real answer and we are happy to give it.