Tramping in the Bush (Waiomu Bay)

So on the second day I was here, Gary and Petro took me "tramping in the bush" which I'm sure most of you smarties realized just means hiking in the woods/mountains. We went to LOCATION which is about a twenty minutes north of Thames up the coast. In New Zealand (as is true in hiking areas in the States which I never really did) they have multiple trails which you can travel, but there are main trails. Essentially, if you start on a trial with an orange triangle, you follow the orange triangles to stay on the trail. The trail that we went on was nice because it was pretty clear where you were supposed to go, but Gary said that was a really nice trail compared to others. The trail we decided to go to was about an hour long trail in which Gary showed me old "ruins" of when people used to mine and extract gold in these mountains.

It was pretty amazing in these woods and it was fun hiking in it because there are many creeks that run throughout the woods, and in order to get across them, you have to find rocks to jump on across. We were pretty lucky because it has been dry lately, so the bigger rocks were above the water and they hadn't been wet recently so they weren't slippery. It was still fun finding a route to hop across! Only got my shoes wet once! 

The main part of hour trek was to see the old places where gold miners used to do their work. Gold is one of the main things (if not the main thing) that created Thames as a city (which was established in 1867. If you wander off the main path you can find various holes and batteries that were used by these miners. There are many warnings to stay on the main path because there are many holes that were carved out of the ground and the rock in order to get the gold that may be covered by brush and debris. Gary took me off the path to show me an old battery. 

You can just barely see some stone in this picture. Gary said this was probably once a three story building in which they processed the gold and maybe extracted it? We had to cut through some bush to get to this since it wasn't on the main path (shorts were not a good idea)

This is an old rusty circle in which a huge metal object was used to extract the gold possibly? It sounds like the gold was put into this big thing which spun around and extracted the gold. I'm not quite sure though!

They had these signs by each of the holes dug out by the miners. This hole pictured below would most likely be one that people wouldn't be dumb enough to go down, but some of them look pretty interesting so I could see some intense travelers/adventurers wanting to take a look! I was fine with just peeking over the edge. 

This is right up looking down into the main hole. Although it can't really be seen in the picture, this hole went down probably at least 30 feet, and there was another hole carved going up (or above this one in the rock since we went down a hill to get to this hole) and another hole if you just looked straight across where we were standing. These tunnels were used to make it easier to get to certain areas where the gold was and easier to transport the gold. 

This is just the outside of that big hole. The picture above was taken basically standing in that hole.

This is another, more friendly looking hole that was tempting to climb into. However, I'm not a fan of small spaces so I thought a nice picture would do! But this is an example of a hole that brave adventurers would probably be intrigued to go into.

The final part of the trek was to climb a ton of stairs to get to the top of a certain peak. This was called Waiomu and was where a lot of Kauri trees can be seen. These trees are pretty common in Thames and were used to create and build many different items back in the day. What workers would do, is they would cut the tree down, cut all of it's branches off at the top, roll the tree down the mountain/hill into the river to have them float down, and then build a dam to stop the trees floating down the river and control where they went. These trees were used to build similar items out of wood that we see back in the States. 

The sign tells trampers where they are and the type of tree that can be seen.

This tree that I am standing by is pretty huge, but it is probably only 70 years old or so. These trees can get HUGE! If you don't believe me then you can just google it and probably find some neat pictures.

After making it to the top, we had to go back down. However, to my left in the picture above is a sign pointing out three other treks, and it provides the time that it would take to hike them. The one that I really want to do is a total of 9 hours long, but it brings us right back into Thames! Gary and Petro said they would drop us (as in me and the other two girls staying with me) off here where we started this trek and then we would just walk back home! I think it will be a lot of fun! 

This was my first official tramp here in NZ, and it was a very informational and interesting one! I can't wait to explore much more of NZ!