State Highway 3 through the Awakino Gorge is open this weekend, on continuous one-lane convoys running day and night between New Plymouth and Te Kūiti. The Saturday-and-Sunday window is the easier one for travellers before a tighter weeknight-only convoy schedule resumes on Tuesday morning.
Through the working week, the road remains closed between roughly 7am and 5pm so contractors can keep clearing the thirty-plus slips and the 16,000-cubic-metre mass of mud and rock that closed the gorge for two weeks after Cyclone Vaianu. From 5pm to 7am on weekdays, piloted convoys run in both directions on a fixed timetable.
Convoy times
NZTA’s published schedule sends southbound convoys from the rest area near the Awakino historic tunnel at 5pm, 8pm, 11pm, 2am and 5am. Northbound convoys leave the Manganui Road meeting point at 6.30pm, 9.30pm, 12.30am, 3.30am and 6.30am. Each escorted run takes around half an hour to clear the gorge. Public toilets are available at both meeting points, and NZTA says any changes to the timetable will be flagged with at least 24 hours’ notice.
This weekend’s continuous-convoy block began at 5pm on Friday 8 May and is scheduled to run through to 7am on Tuesday 12 May. From Tuesday the weekday 7am-to-5pm closure pattern resumes.
When will it fully reopen
The agency has signalled a target of late May for the next phase, when the daytime closures end and the road moves to 24-hour stop-and-go traffic management. A fully unrestricted reopening will follow only once the underlying slip faces are stabilised, a job complicated by ten underslips — sections where the carriageway is intact on top but the embankment beneath it has been scoured out by the storm.
NZTA has been blunt that the gorge is now in a more fragile state than it was before the storm, and the next significant rain event could shut it again with little notice. Travellers planning trips this week should check the NZTA Journeys live status page before leaving home.
A culture of the wait
The convoy waits have produced their own small culture along the gorge. RNZ reported on 6 May that drivers were filling the half-hour holds with crochet and dog walks and truck-cab tidy-ups. One traveller had a baby blanket on the needles for a friend. Another, Kim Tangaroa, was driving through to Hamilton for cataract surgery and using the wait to settle her nerves. Truck driver James Tāne told the broadcaster the queues had become useful downtime, with drivers taking the chance to “do some maintenance on the truck, a bit of a clean out inside the cab”.
If you would rather not wait
The official detour for the Taranaki-to-Waikato run is via Stratford and the inland route through Taumarunui, which adds about two hours each way but stays open continuously. The detour is the right call for anyone on a tight schedule, anyone driving a heavy or oversize load that struggles in a tight one-lane convoy, or anyone with medical or freight commitments at the far end. Patients travelling between New Plymouth and Waikato Hospital, in particular, have been hit hard by both the closure and the convoy timetable.
MΕkau, Awakino, Piopio and the small settlements along the gorge route are open for business and trading through the convoy stops, and several of the campervan-and-coffee operators along the seabird-and-river side of the road have reported a quiet uptick in trade as drivers fill the half-hour wait with a flat white and a sausage roll.
Have you driven the gorge this week? Tell us about your wait, your detour, or how the convoys are running in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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