Mapua and Golden Bay

A tidy little 3 bedroom house for sale £45,000, in a nicely situated country town. Pity I only have a six month visa.

After leaving Reefton I headed north to Mapua, camping in a D.O.C. site for the night at St. Arnaud by Lake Rotoiti. This is a Department of Conservation area with some very good forest walks, with a lot of information on the conservation work that is being done.

Honey production in this area is big farming business, I was talking to one lady who manages 2000 hives. There are apiaries everywhere.

 

I arrived in Mapua April 5th and spent the Easter staying with friends. It was good to sleep in a bed and relax for a few days. Their garden extended down to the beach of the river estuary.

Plenty of wildlife.

After Easter I continued north west to Golden Bay. There was some beautiful scenery but the weather was not too good. I followed the  coast road to Farewell Split.

Coffee and carrot cake at the cafe with views of the Spit.

The black dots in the water are Aussie black swans they have adapted to salt water and have become a pest, there are thousands of them all through Golden Bay

I drove across the cape to Whanganui beach, there is a campsite there where I intended to stay the night.

Access to the beach is across these sand dunes.

When I reached the beach the weather was defiantly on the turn and it started to rain, I got back to the van without getting too wet.

See the difference in the sky over about 2 hours in the last 6 pictures. The rain was set in for the day, so I decided not to stay but return to Collingwood for the night.

The following day I visited  Pupu Springs, (Waikoroppupu) they claim to have the clearest water in the world and I don’t doubt that.

Spot the trout!

A cheeky poser. Whilst I was reading the sign.

I discovered another interesting forest walk to the source, or the resurgence of the Riwaka River.

The river starts from this cave under the mountain.

Earlier I mentioned the future intended renovation of the Reefton hydro station. This is an example of a similar project mostly done by a group of enthusiastic volunteers. This plant was in much the same state as the Reefton unit and after a lot of work it is now supplying 800MW per annum to the grid.

I returned to Mapua at the end of the week and spent the weekend with my friends again.

Linda, Lionel and their daughter Pamela.

I was staying in Mapua during the weekend of the annual pumpkin competition, The winner weighed in at 616kg.

I am not sure of the weight of the second.

There were many smaller entries.

Reefton

Reefton was in the centre of the gold rush in the 1800’s, It was so rich in those days that it was decided to build a hydroelectric power station on the river bank. This town in 1886 was the first town in the southern hemisphere to have electricity. There was enough power to run 500 25 candle power light bulbs but this was enough for a small town. Unfortunately the power station is in ruins, I understand that the generator is in store and the intention is to rebuild the complete system when funds allow. A considerable amount of money has been spent in this town on renovation as you will see from my photographs.

I took a long walk all around the town starting by crossing the river to get to the site of the old power station.

  

Most of the race is still intact and could be renovated without too much work.

The actual power station site is a wreck.

I continued down this bank of the river and crossed the road bridge back into the town.

The lamp posts are replicas of the original including the pair of insulators on each pole.

A Fairlie R28, narrow gauge locomotive one of many that were used in the gold rush days. This was built by Avonside Engineering Co. Bristol in 1879. These were built for the Welsh mountains but were ideal for the New Zealand mountain conditions.

  

A trip around the town. These first 2 pictures were the original town banks, one of then this is a bank. BNZ Bank of New Zealand

This was the original mine owners house.

I was photographing the Old Court House when i was invited in by a very charming lady with whom I became quite friendly, she told me a lot about the town history. Her name was Alison Hale and I understand she is a well know New Zealand artist. She uses the Court house as a studio and has a gallery in the town.

 

Reefton was a delightful place and I enjoyed my stay there.

Reefton Gold Mine

After leaving Westport I called in at an inland town called Reefton, I only intended to stop overnight but stayed for 3 days, On the first day I visited a modern working gold mine, a bit different from a load of old timers panning in a river.

The mine is 500m up in a dip between two mountains. The plan when mining is finished is to re-forest and turn the mine into a lake.

These vehicles look quite small like little dumper trucks but they are each carrying 130 tonne of stone. In this vast pit the gold seams are very small and thousands of tonnes of rock are moved each day to uncover the area of rock with seams in.

The rock that contains gold is then taken to the processing plant.

In this huge mill the rock is ground up to the consistency of flour.

It is rotated in the mill with a large quantity of steel balls which crack up the rock.

The steel balls very soon wear down and become discarded.

 

After the rock has been ground up it is converted to a sludge with mixture of water chemicals and a wetting agent. the wetting agents forms bubbles on the top of the sludge and the chemicals cause the gold to rise to the top and mix with the bubbles.

Hollow evacuated ceramic discs are used to collect the very small percentage of material containing gold from the surface. It is then dried on the discs and scraped off as a paste.

By the time we get to the stage of this paste thousands of tonnes of rock have been discarded. The paste is then loaded into trucks and taken to Dunedin for the final stage of extraction. The plant required is so expensive $85,000.000 it is cheaper to move the material to the other side of the country than build an additional plant in Reefton.

The trucks below are full of this sludge ready to go to Dunedin each of these trucks holds a total of 28 tonnes in 2 trailers, when processed this will yield about 200g of gold about 7oz.

 

This is the main control room, the lady on the left is the plant manager.

I was asking about the the costs. To produce 1oz of gold costs US$600 the current market price of gold is about US$1600 an ounce so despite the enormous amount of work it is profitable. This was quite an experience.