Where Is Greytown? An Hour Over the Remutaka Hill

Greytown is a small town on the Wairarapa plains, in the lower North Island, about an hour and a quarter's drive from Wellington over a winding hill road. That road is the reason the answer to where is Greytown is never quite as simple as the distance suggests: it is 77 kilometres by road from the capital, but the Remutaka Hill sits in the middle of them.

Here is where it sits, how to reach it, and how far it is to everywhere else worth going.

Where Greytown is

The town sits in the South Wairarapa District, within the wider Wellington Region, on the flat farmland between the Remutaka and Tararua ranges to the west and the coastal hills to the east. The postcode is 5712 and the population is about 2,840.

It is one of five towns strung along State Highway 2 through the valley, and it sits roughly in the middle of them, which turns out to matter if you are choosing a base. Its Māori name is Hūpēnui.

Greytown was laid out in 1854 as New Zealand's first planned inland settlement under the Small Farms Association scheme, and named for Governor Sir George Grey. That it was planned rather than grown is still visible in the street layout.

Driving from Wellington

The drive is 77 kilometres by road, which in a straight line is only about 62. The difference is the Remutaka Hill.

State Highway 2 leaves Wellington through the Hutt Valley and climbs over the Remutaka range on a road of tight, stacked corners with a summit in the middle. It is well engineered and entirely manageable in an ordinary car, but it is not a motorway and it does not reward hurrying. Anyone prone to car sickness should sit in the front.

The road closes occasionally in severe weather, usually high wind or snow at the summit, and there is no quick alternative when it does. If you are driving over in a storm, check the road status rather than the town forecast, because Greytown itself can be perfectly fine while the hill is shut.

The compensation is the view. Coming down the eastern side the whole Wairarapa valley opens out in front of you, and it is genuinely one of the better road entrances to a region in the North Island.

Getting there by train

The Wairarapa Line runs between Wellington and Masterton, and the station that serves Greytown is at Woodside, out on the flats west of town. The train does not come into Greytown itself, and there is no walkable connection worth relying on with luggage, so plan a lift or a taxi from the station.

That gap has a history. A branch line into Greytown opened in 1880, after the main line was routed through Woodside instead of the town, and it ran until it closed on Christmas Eve 1953. The rail trail now follows that alignment: flat, 4.6 kilometres one way, 9.2 there and back.

So the walk between town and station exists, and people do ride it. It is just not a wheeled-suitcase proposition.

How far to everywhere else

Greytown sits in the middle of the Wairarapa's five towns, which is the practical argument for staying here rather than at either end of the valley. These are straight-line distances, so allow more by road.

• Carterton is 8.4 kilometres to the north-east
• Featherston is 12.1 kilometres to the south-west
• Martinborough is 15.5 kilometres due south
• Masterton is 21.9 kilometres to the north-east
• Lower Hutt is 49.1 kilometres to the south-west
• Wellington is 61.7 kilometres to the south-west

Nothing in the Wairarapa is far from anything else. The whole valley is comfortably a day's driving loop, and none of the four neighbouring towns is more than a short run down the highway.

Which town to pair with Greytown

Each of the neighbours does something Greytown does not, which makes a two-town day easy to build.

Martinborough, due south, is wine country proper. The village is ringed by vineyards within cycling distance of its square, and if wine is the point of your trip that is where it should be spent rather than here.

Carterton, just up the road, is the closest of the lot and has Stonehenge Aotearoa, which is exactly what it sounds like and better than that description implies.

Featherston, at the foot of the hill, is the first town you reach coming over from Wellington and is known for books and its railway history, including the Fell Locomotive Museum.

Masterton is the largest town in the valley and the service centre for it, with the shops and facilities that a town of Greytown's size does not carry.

Arriving from the north or the coast

Most visitors come over the hill from Wellington, but that is not the only way in. From the north, State Highway 2 runs down the valley through Masterton and Carterton and into Greytown from the top, which avoids the Remutaka entirely. Anyone driving from Palmerston North, Hawke's Bay or the central North Island arrives this way.

That route matters more than it sounds if the hill road is closed. The northern approach is longer from Wellington but it is an alternative rather than a dead end, which is worth knowing in bad weather.

From the Wairarapa coast, Martinborough sits between Greytown and the coastal road, so a trip in from Cape Palliser or the eastern beaches comes through wine country before it reaches here.

Parking and getting around town

Greytown is walkable end to end. The retail run is about three hundred metres, the full main street around a kilometre, and everything in these guides sits within a few minutes' walk of it apart from the campground and the trailhead, which are both about five minutes off.

Parking is free and angle-in along Main Street. It fills from mid-morning on Saturdays and is effectively gone during the July festival, when parts of the street close to traffic altogether. Park once and walk. The town is not big enough to justify moving the car, and circling for a closer space is how people waste twenty minutes of a short day.

There is no public transport within the town itself, and no need for any.

Getting your bearings when you arrive

State Highway 2 runs straight down the middle as Main Street, which means the road you arrive on is the road everything is on. Cobblestones and the chocolate cottage are at the southern end, the Top Pub at the northern end, and most of the shops and kitchens fall between them.

Kuratāwhiti Street runs west off Main Street toward the park, the pool, the playground and the campground. Cotter Street, further west again, is where the rail trail begins. That is the entire geography you need.

Once you have that, what is actually worth your time here is easy to plan around a single parking spot.

If you decide against driving back over the hill in the dark, there are five places to stay in the village and they are all within the geography described above.

One last thing worth weighing before a winter trip: the hill road behaves differently by season, and the crossing is the part of this journey most affected by it.