4 - Rotorua

I was driving south on route thirty three towards Rotorua, I had been gaining height for a while now and my car was revving over a thousand times more than normal every minute just to maintain the one hundred kilometre per hour speed limit. Then as the roads started to level out it struck me, the awful stench of rotten eggs. This influx of hydrogen sulphide was sure sign that I had arrived in the geothermal area which Rotorua lies right in the middle of. The smell persisted unabated all the way to Rotorua, where it became even more potent. Buildings often concentrated this smell where upon walking into places like supermarkets I was often hit, as if by a blast wave from an explosion, by this sulphurous smell, in short the smell of rotten egg was inescapable and ubiquitous. Thankfully it is the type of thing that you can get used to, phew.

(Lake Rotorua from Rotorua)

The next morning I decided to walk around Rotorua so I could see what the town was like and to say that I have actually ‘been there’. In my lonely planet guide there was a walk through the town which took in the geothermal park, the waterfront and some historic buildings. I headed off along the route of the thick black line on the map but soon found that navigating a path through a grid based  town where each road is most distinguished by their different selection of similar looking shops (yeah, road signs too) is not simple so after a few wrong turns here and there I arrived at the park. This park is unusual because it lies in the middle of the town but it is contains a large number of hot pools and bubbly mud, all of which inject the lovely hydrogen sulphide smell into the air. The whole length of the park was full of the most unusual features, rocks sending out plumes of steam, small pools of bubbly mud bubbling like water in a boiling kettle, medium sized pools of bubbly mud making noises such as blub..... blub..... blub..... and then there were large swimming pool sized pools shrouded in a fog of war as the surface water evaporated. There really were all kinds of alien features in a small area, all of them enclosed within overgrown fenced off enclosures in what otherwise would appear to be a totally normal and well kept grassy park.  

(Lake in Rotorua park)

The path then headed onto the lake front and I was very glad I wasn’t driving when passing one junction after seeing the road sign pertaining to it. It was as if someone in the highways department had imagined a large white dead starfish on a large green sign and thought, that’ll do. I’ve never seen so much visual overload in one sign, I can imagine drivers seeing it and thinking:

“Now did I want the third or ninth turn off?”

Anyway after arriving at the lake front and ambling along for a while the water turned from normal dark and transparent lake water colour to a grey turquoise colour more reminiscent of a flooded Cornish china clay pit and the rotten egg smell took a noticable uptick. It turns out that there is an active geothermal area under this end of the lake causing the change in colour, it also reduces the oxygen to extremely low levels making aquatic biodiversity extremely low here. It does however support a plethora of marine and fresh water birds species. I came across my first New Zealand Scaups, a black duck, which I found to be pretty darn stupid. I arrived on the lake shore which startled a group of them and they began swimming in a frenzied hurry to reach a small island which all but a few Scaups just clumsily swam into, then, in an instant, they all calmed down as if I was never there. Suddenly, a few seconds later, without a movement or noise from me, the frenzy started again, twenty or so Scaup began high pitched importunate sounding calls, more scuffling occurred, it was every bird for itself again as the bungled island landings resumed and then stopped. Maybe two of them discovered they have legs and got onto the island this time but others on the island had jumped off and joined in with the commotion in the water. I watched this cycle happen three or four times, each time marvelling at their waste of effort and clumsiness, what daffy ducks. 

(New Zealand Scaup, the only labotomised bird species in the country)

After lunch I headed out to see a number of lakes to the east of Rotorua. I arrived at the first, Blue Lake, and parked next to this tranquil spot surrounded by hills clad in dense native bush, this was a very calm and relaxing place. Until the Jet Ski started. I never quite understood the appeal of what they were doing, I dislike doing anything unnecessary that causes enough noise to irritate the people around me, let alone everyone within several kilometres of me. I tried to understand the purpose of his activities but he only made figure of eights or went in really straight lines as fast as he could, as far as I could tell they were all just playing. Very rarely do so few people get to domineer, harass and spoil such an amazing place for so many people. Soon some people in a speed boat turned up so I took this as a sign to leave, not that I needed any more reason. I drove to a view point at the far side of the lake where the view was far more spectacular, there were sun drenched mountains lying beyond Green Lake which lies adjacent to Blue Lake. I went to the information board to find that blue lake was 20,000 years old, or 2000 as some vandal had altered the sign to say, someone doesn’t like geological ages. At this point the jet ski had stopped, thank god, but the speed boat had speeded across on full power and moored close to where I was and its raucous occupants were playing very loud pop music. I don’t know off hand the OED definition of ‘moron’ but these people would definitely fit it.

(Lake Okareka)

The next lake, Lake Tarawera, was very large and had a backdrop of mountains, this was spectacular, magnificent, awe inspiring and any other such adjective that you can think of. I could definitely understand why throngs of holiday homes were spread along the shoreline. Finally I headed to Lake Okareka where I sat and read a few more pages of Corrupted Science without being interrupted by the activities that defiled Blue Lake earlier, until another jet skier appeared and I departed. But first I was quite surprised at how much of a dent an average sized human makes to the bonnet of a rapidly moving car, thankfully he sank in the lake water quite easily with all those rocks tied to him. Just kidding! He’ll still be riding roughshod over all that is calm and pleasant somewhere. I decided to swap the lakes for the backpackers and retired for the evening.

(Lady Knox geyser)

The next step of my journey was to head to Taupō but to make my journey more interesting I was going to a Wai-O-Tapu, a geothermal park, which contains Lady Knox geyser that erupts at 10:15 every single day. I arrived at the Geyser along with several tens of other people and took a seat in the amphitheatre like seating. As the time ticked down to 10:15 a guide stepped out next to the geyser and explained how some prisoners discovered this geyser when they came to wash their clothes in the naturally warm water here and discovered more than they bargained for. The time now was almost exactly 10:15 and the guide was still standing next to the geyser so potentially about to get soaked, he’d better move quick I was thinking but if he didn’t then I had my camera ready. But then ten fifteen passed by a minute or so and nothing had happed, what was wrong, I was told that it worked like clockwork. The guide then took out a chunk of surfactant, effectively soap, and informed us that this sets the geyser off when he drops it in at 10:15, ah, I got it then. Once started the build up was slow, the water just dribbled over the edge to start with, but soon built up into a several metre high jet of water that lasts anything from a few minutes to over an hour.

(Champaign Pool; Not a place to drop your car keys into.)

The other section of the site was a walk through of a geothermal hotspot, there were many different environments here and it was anything but monotonous, every corner yielded something new, it was great. Many sections were like the kind of environment you’d expect to see in the aftermath of 19^th century mining operations except here it was alive, steaming, bubbling, flowing, stinking and every bit a part of the landscape as the trees and birds around us. My favourite feature was the Champaign pool, this was a circular pool of turquoise blue water with a rim of bulbous orange growths around it. The most amazing aspect of it is that it is less than twenty metres across but seventy five metres deep and one hundred and fifty celsius at the bottom where it narrows down to a tiny fracture in the rock. I certainly found here very interesting but alas I had to be in Taupō soon so I got back in my car and headed south.

3 - Waihi and Karangahake. There be gold in them hills.

When you stand next to the Cornish pumping house and peer through the chain link security fence into the gaping chasm below you called Martha Quarry then there’s no doubting that someone really wanted the gold down there. Gold was discovered here in 1878 by two prospectors, John McCombie and Robert Lee, who decided that the gold was not present in sufficient enough quantities to make commercial mining operations worthwhile and promptly abandoned their claim. This would turn out to be potentially the worst decision they both would ever make in their whole lives. The following year a new prospector took on the claim which he named Martha, after one of his family members, and, in short, Martha mine is now the most important gold mining site in the whole of New Zealand. 

The area now produce 100,000 ounces (2.83 tonnes) of gold and 750,000 ounces (21.26 tonnes) of silver every year. With the current gold price of NZ$2,209.99 (£1,154.61) per ounce this place oozes more money than you can shake multiple sticks at and the gold price just keeps inexorably reaching dazzling new highs every week at the moment. As I was gazing awe struck at the tiny looking enormous dumper trucks in the quarry far below it’s quite possible that a debt scare in Italy or a jobless rate increase in the US was silently and invisibly adding millions of dollars on the value of the land below my feet just in the few minutes that I was standing there, crazy as.

 

(Marth quarry, that's the bottom you can see at the bottom there.) 

Talking of 'crazy as', the Cornish pumping house didn’t used to be sited where it currently is. Its original location, some three hundred metres away, was at risk of subsidence from abandoned underground workings and plans to extend the quarry would have engulfed the building. Being a listed building the quarry owners had a duty to preserve this historic structure and the best course of action was to literally move it out of harms way, but weighing in at 1,840 tonnes this was no mean feat. The move happened in 2006 when the structure was ‘sawed’ from its foundations and slid along Teflon plates centimetre by centimetre until it’s current location was reached. It has the epithet of being the largest concrete structure in the southern hemisphere to be moved in one piece. I always find the phrase ‘biggest/largest/fastest etc in the southern hemisphere’ a bit less impressive than I think its Antipodean promulgators expect me to find it. Not to doubt that some of the feats are very much worthy of admiration but when your competition is, Australia, southern Africa, Latin America, Antarctica and unimaginably vast areas of ocean then it does take the wow factor out of the phrase a bit.

 

(The Cornish pumping house.)

My reason for heading into Waihi first thing today was to go on a tour of the gold quarry and processing works. It turned out that I was the only person booked on the tour this morning so I had the whole minibus to myself. The tour took us to the outer edge of the quarry to start with which was mainly to demonstrate an old preserved mining building and some replanted native trees, because mining companies like to do nice things, but what I found most interesting was the pile of worn out dumper truck tyres.  Costing NZ$20,000 a shot and measuring in with over a two metre diameter they were piled in serried lines, perhaps twenty or thirty of them just lying there in worn down retirement. When I asked what will happen to them I was surprised to hear that they’ll probably all end up at the bottom of the quarry when it’s flooded in several years, obviously they don’t recycle them here. As the tour continued I heard how the ‘greens’ can be a problem with some aspects of the mines activities, I was going to comment on this but I think the guide liked me so I didn’t want to make him change his mind halfway through the tour. We continued past the processing works where there were spinning ore crushing drums and fans blowing steam into the air from corrugated steel buildings connected together with networks of stainless steel pipes. Did you know that purple is the international colour for industrial cyanide, I didn’t either. Or that roasted coconut shells are integral to the gold smelting process, interesting stuff. Finally we went to the tailings dams where I was told about a rare type of bird that has nested next to the pools for a few years now, I never saw it but I decided to take his word for it anyway. As I arrived back at the Visitor centre I decided to ask about the Cornish Engine house and if it once had a chimney, like engine houses in Cornwall do, and other Cornish related things because I was genuinely curious. I found out that it once had a steel chimney which is now gone.

(Relayed tramway, the truck is chained down, so no joy riding.)

Following the beach and a brief sojourn to Paeroa to get my hair cut I headed back to Karangahake to walk along the Watewheta Gorge. I only loosely decided to go on this walk but I’m so glad I did because it has to be singularly my favourite part of the whole of New Zealand so far. The walk is called ‘The Windows’ and it follows two disused gold mining tramways. When I arrived there I found that the Department of Conservation had relayed tramway along the route of the track bed, wow, it mustn’t be considered a health and safety trip-hazard in New Zealand. Another thing I found very unusual was the amount of old mining artefacts that remain just lying around. As I walked along the tramway I came across a some old machinery which included a connecting rod about as thick as my arm that was bent, I don’t know what bent it but I certainly wouldn’t liked to have been nearby when it happened.

(Entering the gorge side.)

It soon became apparent how the walk gained its name. As the sides of the gorge became sheer cliffs the tramway cut a tunnel into the side of the gorge and only re-emerged once more favourable gradients, i.e. not vertical, were reached further up the river. The ‘windows’ are tunnels that intersect the main tramway tunnel and lead from the gold mines on one side of the tramway to the cliff edge on the other side. This allowed for waste materials to be tipped directly from the mines into the river quite a long way below. This makes for a very interesting atmosphere where the long dark tunnel is interrupted by shafts of light emanating from the world outside. It also helps you see where you are going.

 ('The Windows.')

Further upstream is the entrance to Crown Mine which in its day was the predominant mine in the Karangahake area. Today it’s only a fraction of what it used to be, there is a gated off empty chamber, some iron poles in the ground and an old rusting boiler perched perilously in the undergrowth above the far side of the river. Even the entrance to the mine is now a denuded shadow of its former self. In its day this location was a hive of activity, a hydro electric generator, a large tramway bridge and a wooden lift to both levels of the mine as well as other temporary wooden structures. I’d like a time machine to be invented so I could go back in time and see what mines used to be like, all the activity and precarious wooden structures working away without the use of inordinate amounts of energy or huge machines.

The tunnels however weren’t over yet because on the far side of the gorge there were more of them, the jewel in the crown though was the underground pump house. This was in a cavern half fenced off and my tiny campers head torch could just about cut through the dampness to make out what looked like a large iron beam like those used in Cornish engine houses. This is the type of thing that you hear about in Cornwall but you never get to see because the scrap man came when the mine closed or the tunnels flooded when South Crofty stopped pumping. But here was one right in front of me, nice. I stared at it for a bit and found a gap in the railings where I thought I could just about fit through, this will remains conjecture for now as I was becoming rather hungry so decided to go and make food.

(The bridge is on the site of an older tramway bridge, the miners got a pretty good view, eh.)

Back at the backpackers I found that the riots were still happening across the UK and Gloucester was involved now, I always viewed Gloucester as a nice city but I might have to reconsider that now.

2 - Southern Coromandel.

I was rather pleased today to wake up and find the weather was in keeping with the weather forecast because today I was paying not insignificant amounts of money to go kayaking to Cathedral Cove. So I packed a second pair of clothes and a towel in my car and headed off to Hahei where the kayaks awaited.

I arrived at the beach and was introduced to the New Zealander guide and the two fellow Brits who would be joining us and we soon set off across the water towards Motueka Island. This was only a few kilometres but when you are in a kayak in open water getting anywhere seems to take ages. I get the impression that this is due to there being no close by landmarks so as you move through the water the changing parallax of the distant trees, cliffs and other objects becomes awfully laboured, like looking into the distance from a moving train for example. Maybe we were actually just slow, but whatever the reason kayaking over a large expanse of water always feels like an awful lot of effort for not much return. Perhaps travelling near the speed of light under your own steam feels like this, I thought. Anyway the tour guide was telling us about the marine reserve that was set up in the area that bans fishing within its boundaries. Since it was set up in 1993 the marine life has increased “sixteen hundred percent” as the he put it, so there is now sixteen times more marine life in the area than before, pretty good going. He also told us that a Maori chief who settled the area saw Motueka Island, our destination, and claimed it looked a body part of his and that we had to guess what he said it was. The island had a central rounded peak with two rounded valleys that ended in two other peaks that were lower than the central one. The reason he claimed the island to look like a part of him and get his tribe to agree on the matter is because that gave him the jurisdiction to ascend the feature and claim all the land he could see from it for himself, simple as. As we neared the island all three of us had no idea what the feature resembled, so begrudgingly the tour guide told us that he claimed it to look like his nose. He obviously had imagination!

We circumnavigated the island and saw seals lounging blithely on some pretty jagged rocks. They all glanced up briefly to inspect the newcomers and then dropped their heads down again as if we weren’t worth the effort. After negotiating a natural sea tunnel we made a beeline for Cathedral Cove. En route there was a solitary penguin, solitary not being its species name but rather because the vast majority of its species would be hanging around the south of the South Island at this time of year, poor (or just retarded) penguin.

Cathedral cove, it turns out, not only contains one tourist attraction, but two, the most photographed rock in New Zealand (apparently) lies in the cove too. This is Sail rock, which does actually resemble a sail. It is a stack with a vertical side and a slightly sloping side and the base is the narrowest point of the whole structure like the mast of a ship. The cove is named after a naturally formed cave which has the profile of a gothic cathedral window, which I think it pretty accurate description too. Not that there's a competition or that nomenclature even matters but so far it’s two-nil to the Europeans on realistic natural feature name resemblances. Although if I had the chance of gaining all the land I could see from a point then I would claim any salient feature to look like anything of mine, left foot, index finger, gall bladder etc, even if it was just an amorphous pile of rocks.

We stayed in the cove for a while and had biscuits and hot drinks prepared for us whilst we inspected the cave. Access through the cave was banned because recently some rocks had fallen from the ceiling and, in an unexpected health and safety spectacle, bright yellow warning signs and yellow rope was strung across both entrances. Other unexpected news was when I heard they are going to put concrete on the ceiling of this natural wonder to avoid further rock falls from happening, but I suppose there’s not much else that they can do.

We soon departed Cathedral Cove and rounded the headland into Stingray Bay, so named because of the large amounts of stingrays, of Steve Irwin infamy, that frequent the bay. Thankfully they still frequent the bay and they can be seen against the white sandy floor moving in no particular hurry from one random bit of sand to another. They first appeared as slow moving dark blobs barely discernable from small rocks but as the water cleared and sharp outlines and colours became discernable their form became obvious; they were diamond (square) in shape with a tail from one corner. They made absolutely no threatening manoeuvres or actions but just serenely swam and minded their own business as they passed under the kayaks. So why anyone would want go out of their way to kill these creatures in the aftermath of Steve Irwin’s death I really can’t understand.

The next bay had another unimaginative but factually accurate name; Gemstone Bay. At one time gemstones were discovered here in what must have been noticeably larger numbers than on a normal beach. But alas, the chances of finding any here now are much diminished as humans have scoured the area pretty much clean of them. What most distinguished this bay now was the self guided snorkelling tour. This involved a series of ropes which connected several floating buoys adorned with local wildlife information boards so snorkelers would know what wildlife they were seeing around them. I looked for a board that said ‘Great White Shark’, because they do live in these waters and have mauled eleven people, possibly snorkellers, to death around New Zealand so far, but there was no information on them at all. After this we headed back to the beach at Hahei where the trip was over but at least I didn’t have to sit in several centimetres of water any more, yippee.

I spent the rest of the day just meandering around the area, I went to the rope swing put up by a local fireman because the kids would put rope swings up any way and he decided he could tie a safer rope swing than they could. I also went to Cooks beach where the road signs directing me towards the town centre ceased when I reached a place with three shops next to the road, I never did find the town centre. After this is retired to the backpackers in Whitianga for the evening.

The next day, today, would be an unplanned day of many beaches as I drove from Whitianga to Karangahake. My first unplanned stop was in a place called Tairua which had an unusually high and pointy hill on its seafront so without hesitation I took the next left and aimed my car towards it. The bottom two thirds of the hill was a big housing estate demonstrating the aesthetics of houses pretty much anywhere in New Zealand despite being in such an unusual and beautiful location. I wound my way through here and found a car park from where I began my perambulation to the summit. The views from the summit were amazingly spectacular, the sea was the pale blue you see often on postcards and views over the mountains in the other direction were available in all their verdant splendour, this was a very pleasant place to be. I was jealous of all the locals who could stroll up here before breakfast every morning and still be on time for work. I came across a notice board once more with the geological time scratched off, I’m very intrigued to know who does this.

Once I was on the road again I decided to head to Opoutere beach. The beach path intersects a pine woodland and emerges on the beach which, as I discovered to my delight, was empty apart from a fisherman who was too far away to be of any bother to me. This was such a wonderful place that I had no choice other than to take my book, Corrupted Science, and read in the warm sun and gentle cooling breeze for an hour or so, someone had to do it. I was on the section of religious corruption in science and it turns out the much trumped religion-science war isn’t happening as the media often portrays. The vast majority of people in both groups just want to get on with what they’re doing and let everyone else get on with their lives and work but there are a few who don’t. Some of them have lots of political power, especially in the US and lots of right-winged organizations around the world, and it’s very scary. The chapter ended with stories of how creationists who are also scientists, who do exist and conduct proper science, have come a cropper of corruption and been discredited when they tried to mix their religion with science, fools. But as all good things must come to an end, my time on the beach had to end and to the car I headed.

Later on in the day I got my first view of a live weta, these are large insects, some as big as my hand, and although they are harmless they can bite. I came across the wetas whilst walking into a mine entrance and shone my light at the wall next to me to find a fist sized insect about thirty centimetres from my face. One thing I can say is that they aren’t a pretty sight at any distance, let alone close up. I retreated from the mine after I stared at them for a bit and took pictures because as far as I knew they jump towards movement or light sources like my head torch and this I didn’t want to happen.

I drove down the windiest road in the whole world and arrived in Waihi where there is a huge Cornish engine house and Marth Quarry which is a gold quarry that is more than a trifle big. You shall here more on Waihi in my next post, for now I headed off to The Golden Owl in Karangahake for a good nights rest.

1 - Northern Coromandel, the railway to nowhere and the goat.

After a previous false start to my trip around the Coromandel I set off again, this time virus free. The first leg of my trip took me through Thames which was still as aesthetically uninteresting as before and before I knew it I was on route 25 northbound towards Coromandel. I was told previously that this road was a coastal road and now having driven along this road I understand why Kiwis say they are good at understatements because at some points the road practically was in the sea, I’m sure my car nearly got splashed by waves on a number of occasions. One thing that stuck me along this road as being pretty darn stupid were the locations of some of the houses along the sea front. It’s true that it must have been a rather high high tide but still some of the houses must have been built at most a metre above the water level and in a very active earthquake, and therefore tsunami, region of the planet. If I ever buy or rent a house over here I would like to buy one where the chances of drowning in my own bed as I slept at night, due to a tsunami, being absolutely zero, which patently these houses did not offer. I can just imagine the estate agent’s pamphlet on the house stating: Immaculate sea views, off road parking, potentially won't drown inside, bins collected fortnightly. These were only brief wonderings of thought as the road which consisted mostly of a thin strip of tarmac placed between the undulating grey sea and a vertigo inducing cliff with very few protective barriers so it required very high levels of concentration. On the sharpest bends signs were placed warning of lorries approaching from the middle of the road, these aren’t like British roads, I was definitely entering proper New Zealand now.

I arrived in Coromandel intact and found it to be a rather smaller town than I had envisioned and it still had the feeling of being a mining boom town, I couldn’t tell if this was because it once was one or whether it was a subtle show for the tourists, probably a mixture of both I decided. The main street followed a long and windy course with a small number of shops and cafes which rapidly petered out into generic houses along both sides of the drawn out road, Cormandel isn’t based on a grid pattern though and this pleased me. The deserted streets and closed cafes belied the ‘boom town’ feel of the town, the boom times now depend on the time of year and I was here in the slack time. so I went to the only place that was open and looked interesting, the Gold Stamper Battery. This was a small restored gold stamper where the machinery, powered by the largest waterwheel in New Zealand no less, was demonstrated to tourists on the hour on most days of the week. But for groups of one person or fewer this doesn’t happen so I got a quick talk through of the history of gold mining in the area which was free so not totally galling. The proprietor then invited me to look for gold in the small stream passing through the battery and showed me a piece of rock with some native gold breaking its surface. This he found in the stream and told me there was probably about $1,400 of gold in there. He continued to say:

“If you find any gold there you’ll have to take a picture, let me know that you found it on my property, then undertake some [tests whose names slip my memory] and forty percent of any subsequent profits will go the land owner, me.”

I looked around the stream for a few minutes and as I was leaving he asked.

“Did you find any gold?”

“No.”

I believe he then said “Oh well.” Or something similar but it was muttered in an unsurprised but disappointed manner that any one might utter when you’ve just missed out on a few hundred dollars for zero work.

The light was starting to fade now and I was getting hungry so I headed off to the YHA hostel in Coromandel for a good night’s rest. This was an alright place but you have to walk outside to use the toilet at night and to get a paltry few minutes of warm shower water you need to press a button outside the shower block!

I was going on a railway to nowhere today, well I say nowhere but the Eyefull tower stands at the top of the hill where the railway terminates but even this was constructed so visitors would have somewhere to go when they reached the railway’s end so it really is a railway to nowhere. Not that this put me off paying $25 for this apparently futile endeavour, because as reality just ‘is’, railways are just ‘good’. This is the Driving Creek Railway which began as a humble endeavour by Barry, the owner and railway/pottery enthusiast, who started a pottery and constructed a narrow gauge railway to transport clay from the nearby hill for use in his pottery in Coromandel. This railway extended over time and Barry’s bank manager was becoming concerned that the pottery was not bringing in enough money to service the debt taken out to construct the railway. So Barry decided, against the views of most people he knew, to extend the railway and open it to the paying public and from this the Driving Creek Railway was formed. It’s now one of the biggest tourist attractions in New Zealand.

The lower railway terminus consists of a workshop replete with the materials and machines required to maintain a railway. The pottery is also here. The main line left the station and workshop making a sudden turn towards the sky and swinging out of sight to the right, a sense of wonder lay beyond but first I meandered around the station buildings. Not being one for art I ignored the pottery side and gawked at the workshop for a while before taking my seat at the rear end of the powered carriage. This gave me commanding views as the carriage passed though the verdant Coromandel bush. The railway is being used to remove introduced European trees and to transport native trees back up the hill for planting, as well as this the land has been signed over and will belong to the people of New Zealand so it can’t be developed in future.  As the carriage winded its way towards the Eyefull tower the train has to negotiate two spirals, three tunnels and five reversing points as it slowly gained height for the next twenty five minutes. The Eyefull tower is a wooden structure that looks like the biggest gazebo your have ever seen, it probably has the epithet of being the biggest gazebo-like structure in the southern hemisphere, and offered commanding views over the Hauraki Gulf and Coromandel town, on a good day you can even see as far as Auckland. We stopped here for at most ten minutes and then our Liverpudlian driver and host took us on the whole journey back to the start. What a great little railway this was.

 

I now had most of the day to drive forty three kilometres to Whitianga where I’d be stopping for the next two nights. This involved roads even windier than the previous day but rather than being along the coast these were overland in the Coromandel and this means the word flat is very rarely relevant.

I stopped off at two coastal villages along the road both of which were next to long sandy beaches. I visited both the beaches and found vistas almost like being on a deserted Cornish beach during an anticyclone in the height of summer. The sky was deep blue, the sea was turquoise, the beach was white, there wasn’t another person around to disturb the gentle rhythmic ebb and flow of ankle high waves or the warm sun shining merrily all around. These places could have been on postcards and may well be for all I know. The problem is they’re a bit boring, I mean short of a kayak or a good walking track there isn’t anything to do apart from sit and stare at this idyllic landscape and my mind is far too active for this kind of thing, I need activity.

I soon moved on and found a picnic spot next to the main road that was full of old Cornish mining artefacts, well, probably not literally Cornish but based on Cornish designs and principles, so I could not help but pull over into the shoulder and take a look. There was a goat with large horns and sharp hooves by the roadside and it was tied to a tree, or so I thought as I parked my car and got out. Rather it was karabinered to a rope tied between the tree and a fence post thereby allowing it a rounded off rectangular area, which I happened to be parked in, to roam free. Presumably associating humans with food the goat came and greeted me as I took the first steps from my car, bugger. All appeared well though; I took some pictures of the mining stamps and then got back into my car, just in time for the goat to jump on the bonnet! £$"%^&*. Who on Earth lets a bonnet-jumping goat roam onto a public highway where people have to park to get to a picnic site? seriously who! The scratches were only superficial but still they were still scratches. For the rest of the drive my thoughts took a culinary line of thought: Goat burger, goat kebab, goat and chips, goat steak with engrained tyre tread pattern, fried goat containing fragments of car bumper etc, etc.

Anyway, next stop Whitianga which turned out to be another grid based town that had a dull main street and beach just like the other towns so without much to do I got supplies from a supermarket, sadly they didn’t have any goat burgers, and went to the backpackers.

Thames and the Pinnacles.

I shall start off my three week trip by not starting it at off all but here’s an honorary mention to the trip which was the first attempt which I aborted after two nights because of illness:

I had ventured away from Auckland and for the first time found myself in a new town, Thames (pronounced Temz, like the English river), and able to explore as I pleased. My perambulation took me in a dead straight line along the main street which was full of shops with awnings, I liked the awnings, and the slanted parking spaces that oblige drivers to drive into forwards and reverse onto the road, this I didn’t like. At the end of the main street all of three minutes was taken up so I decided to make a ninety degree turn and walk down another dead straight road to the seafront where I made another ninety degree turn then sidestepped the dead straight seafront road so I could walk along the mangrove-clad seafront. The view was somewhat obscured by the mangroves but it turns out that there isn’t too much of a view over the Firth of Thames anyway so I turned my attention to a miniature railway that goes along the seafront in a vague figure of eight design and has quite an intricate station and goods yard layout, nice.

(The first and longest swing bridge (NZ), rope bridge (UK) on the Pinnacles ascent)

 

Thames is a small town best known for and basically exists because of gold. In 1867 a single flake of gold was discovered in a waterfall near Thames and within months the Thames gold rush began. This led to large scale mining, for its day, around Thames and caused the population to balloon to eighteen thousand people compared to a measly just under seven thousand people today. This also led to the creation of the 'Thames School of Mines and Mineralogical Museum' museum which I decided visit. Two more ninety degree turns and three more dead straight roads later and I was there.

Initially a Sunday school the School of Mines building was quite satisfyingly, in my opinion, converted from religious to educational purposes and the interior remains as it was when the school closed in 1953 and it looked and felt pretty much as I’d expect a Victorian school interior to look. Some of the rooms even looked capable of research into phlogiston. The mineralogical museum was rather well stocked and even had some specimens all the way from Cornwall. I could have spent all day staring at the mineral samples, especially galena, a shiny blue ore of lead that draws your attention almost as well as fire does, but people would think I was weird. I suppose I could have set the place on fire for a valid excuse to stare because everyone stares at fire but the police would probably arrest me for arson, damn.

 

(Some steps on the packhorse route)

My reason for staying in Thames was to ascend the Pinnacles. These are a set of peaks in the Coromandel Peninsula which although not the highest in the local area they have sufficient cragginess to make them stand out from the surrounding hills and still offer rather spectacular views. I drove up the gravel road to the start of the track and in the process had all the rust proof protective coating chipped off the underside of my car by small stones and then began the ascent. The track follows an old packhorse route up the mountain that supplied kauri tree loggers with supplies. The logging began in the 1870’s and they were so successful that by 1928 they had removed all they could and therefore put themselves out of work and destroyed native woodlands, well done. The summit was pretty cold and windy with poor visibility, pretty galling for the walk I had just done. I had the option of waiting to see if the weather would improve from this cold horizontal drizzle so I could have a good view or to head back down the mountain to comfy chairs and a heated TV room with a free DVD library. Needles to say three hours later I was eating chips in a comfy chair watching TVNZ 7. 

 (The pinnacles, shrouded in drizzle)

The Pinnacles walk was very enjoyable and if you like walking then I recommend it, it can be done easily as a day walk or you can stay in the hut near the summit overnight which offers enticements such as cold showers and people who might snore all night so I settled for staying in Thames instead. I decided to head back to Auckland the next day because I was feeling quite ill but before that I ended up watching ‘Death at a Funeral’ which is a light hearted British comedy, which is rather funny.

North Island trip.

This blog has been pretty quiet of late but all that is about to change. I have been travelling around the North Island for the last three weeks and in lieu of my own computer I have only been able to access public computers for half an hour or so or have had to pay as much as $2.00 for half an hour, but now I’m back in Auckland with a permanent internet connection.

The trip took me in a clockwise(ish) route around the North Island, I visited most of the main towns and travelled 3,154.7km (1,971.6miles) along some of the most boring and most interesting roads in the country. A map of where I travelled is below:

I shall update this blog in sections every few days and during this time you will hear about a railway that goes to nowhere in particular, why all goats should die, how to move a Cornish engine house over 300 metres whilst keeping it in one piece, the first thing you notice about Rotorua, wind turbines in Hawkes Bay that only blow air around, the suburb of Camborne which differs somewhat from the Camborne I’m so ‘dearly’ acquainted to in Cornwall, GTA imitation in Wanganui and many more exciting things that happened.

If you aren’t excited then you should be...