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.
No comments:
Post a Comment