The town that just refuses to die...

    It's a long ways from Anywhere, about six kilometers from Nowhere, and by all rights it should be a ghost town.
    It may well be just that one day; it's already got one foot in the grave and the other is about to step on a banana peel but Mangaweka's few remaining citizens aren't ready to see their community drop into the abyss just yet. Maybe that's because they're too stubborn for their own good or maybe they don't realize that Mangaweka's time has passed; maybe they just don't want to leave.
   Or maybe they remember when Mangaweka was a thriving little community back in the days when the trains stopped there to let people off and let people on and believe that it can be once again.
   Whatever the reason, they're staying and in their effort to save the town they're coming up with some very interesting ideas for saving their community. They need good ideas because things are bad there these days. Just how bad things are can be summed up this way:

• The school once had 130 pupils; it has only 30 now.
• You can buy a block of four stores on the town's main street (and the property they sit on - which is pretty big) for $160,000 NZ.

    Maybe the biggest and best idea someone had was to haul an old DC-3 into town, put it above a restaurant and call it the Mangaweka International Airport, which - by the way - comes complete with a row of clocks on the wall telling you the time in places like Oslo, Los Angeles and other major destinations. Just FYI - it was 5:22 in Oslo when we stopped for lunch, but I didn't know if that was A.M. or P,M, on Thursday or Friday. (I always have trouble with that whole International Dateline thing.) When we stopped there for lunch - it was Friday afternoon here in New Zealand - on our way to Auckland (yeah, we're on the road... again) I asked the lady behind the counter just what made the airport "international."
    "The big plane outside?" she said and laughed.
    In fact, there is no airport of any kind in Mangaweka - at least none that we could see - but like the sign says as you drive into town on NZ 1: Hot Coffee. Cool Plane.
    There are some artists in town and they're leading the charge to revitalize the town. We spent an hour walking through what's left of Mangaweka before we hit the road again and saw that those artists have decorated some of the historic main street's buildings with murals. They've also put up some sculptures and they've opened a few small galleries. There's also an antique shop, a museum and a couple of small businesses that remain open. The idea, or so I'm told, is to make Mangaweka more than just a place to get a cup of coffee and a pretty good lunch.
    The idea is to make it a destination.
    That could happen. Mangaweka is, after all, on a major highway and that big airplane does definitely catch your eye. If a couple of investors saw the potential there and started fixing up the old main street buildings that started to decay when the jobs dried up and people began moving away so many years ago there's a good possibility that people might go there on a weekend jaunt just to wander around.
    And if those investments were combined with the right kind of advertising, maybe - just maybe - Mangaweka's time hasn't yet passed.
    Maybe - just maybe - it can once again be a thriving little community.

Mangaweka International Airport

Local artists have started decorating the town's historic main street with murals, sculptures and other artistic installations.

... and they want you to know about it.

It's a pretty place, especially now that the trees - tired of winter - are starting to blossom.

Another shot of the "airport."

Sculpture...

The center of town is pretty quiet these days but if the folks trying to revitalize it have anything to say about it, that's going to change.

Small art gallery in what used to be the town's business district.

Elenita even found someone who'd apparently been to Mexico once... we didn't expect to see any signs written in Spanish in this part of the world but it just goes to show that there's always another surprise just around the corner...