Greymouth

We’re about halfway through our stay in Rapahoe, about 10 minutes north of Greymouth. The weather has been typical west coast summer, cool, some rain, but not much wind and there’s a lot to see and do. Wednesday, after getting the grocery shopping out of the way, we did the walk to Point Elizabeth, that starts 5 min from us. Just under a hour each way, the track winds up and down through native bush along the coast. The bush here is dense and I can’t help but imagine what the first people through here thought. If they came by land from north or south, they would have hack their way to the beach, or if by sea, hack their way onto the land. Tough going! Beautiful view from the lookout at Point Elizabeth so well worth the visit. When we got back to the trailhead, we saw a Weka wandering around. They are quite acclimated to humans but this is first one we’ve seen on this trip, they are native to the South Island.

Thursday promised light rain, so we headed out to Reefton, a place recommended by our AirBnB host. It’s about a 45 minute drive up the valley towards Lewis Pass and was founded during the gold rush during the later parts of the 1800’s when they discovered gold veins in the reefs of quartz in the area. It was briefly called Quartzopolis before formally being named Reefton. Today the main street is quirky shops and secondhand stores. Lots to poke around in. Of particularly interest to Cathy and I was the Reefton Distilling Company, founded by Patsy Boss who was born in Reefton. This award winning distillery is a certified B Corp that prioritizes people and plant alongside profitability. We were greeted by a wonderful transplanted French Canadian named Amélie. She had the most wonderful blend of 3 accents, French Canadian, English Canadian , and Kiwi. We had a wonderful time talking about their different gins (trying a few of course) and getting background of the name on all their spirits, Little Biddy. Little Biddy was a 4 foot tall woman gold miner whose real name was Bridgett Goodwin. She arrived in New Zeland from Australia with 2 other men. They lived together and mined for gold. The story goes, they would mine enough gold then head to town and drink until they ran out of money, then back to the gold fields. The following is a excerpt from her reminiscing when she was no longer mining.

It was a hard rough life for a woman. I seen us working all day long up to our hips in water and in all sorts of weather, but me and my mates stuck together, and we managed to make sufficient for tucker, and something over, and we would go to Lyell and sell our gold to the banker there. After buying tucker we knocked down the rest of the money in a long booze, and when it was all spent we would stir ourselves up a bit, swag our tucker on our backs, and return to our hut and to our claim and begin fossicking about for more gold. 

When we were on our way out of town, we saw a small sign for the Reefton Lookout so off we went. The road up was just passable for our little Golf, much more suited to a 4x4 but going slow we made it with no damage. The lookout was also home to all the various cell phone providers towers, for good reason, great coverage from there. On the way home to Raphoe, we took a slightly different route and ended up in Blackball, a small village not far from the coast. Blackball is known as the home of radicalism and workers militancy in New Zealand. They led a 10 week strike in 1903, the longest strike at that point in NZ over the firing of 7 workers for taking longer than their allotted 15 minute lunch break. During the great strike of 1913, the miners from Blackball were the last to return to work. Blackball is credited as the birthplace of the Labour Party in NZ (or a least its forerunner). When the mines closed in 1964, like most towns, it slowly declined. It‘s slowly reviving with support of the Government as a tourist destination of sorts. We stopped at Blackball Salami and ended up with a couple of different salami‘s to round out an upcoming picnic (a few weeks away yet…)

Friday was a local day, laundry in the morning, a walk in downtown Greymouth and a visit to Shantytown in the afternoon, a local tourist attraction depicting mining life int he 1800’s. While the weather forecasts here were for rain all day Thursday and Friday, it was at most intermittent showers. On the way to Shantytown, we stopped at a quilt shop that we’ve been driving past on our way to Greytown. Cool little place and the owner was pleasantly quirky. She had visited Singapore a couple of years ago and went to Little India and was so impressed with the multi coloured buildings that she decided to do the same thing to her car and business. Cathy managed to find a few more bits of NZ fabric for her next quilt.

Shantytown was interesting and described the gold rush as it was, not sanitized. There was a huge amount to destruction to the environment both from the gold rush, and subsequent logging in the area. Unsustainable logging of native timer in particular didn’t stop until a voluntary moratorium was put in place in 1999 and finally regulation and compensation packages passed in 2002. Until this time, the South Island essentially had no logging regulation and native timber is all but gone in may areas. These are slow growing trees so even with careful conservation efforts, it will bee along time to see any substantial regeneration of native forests.

Friday night we went down to the shore to catch the last of the sunset but were a bit late. The sun sets behind Point Elizabeth but still beautiful colours. Maybe we’ll take a drive tonight to catch the sunset over the Tasman Sea.