![]() ![]() In keeping with the mythology surrounding pounamu, we learn that you should never buy or carve the stone for yourself – it should always be a gift between two people. It seems every second shop in town either sells the jade-green jewellery or is an artist’s workshop where skilled carvers create custom pendants, designs guided by the stone’s own energy. After swishing and swirling, Ellie is convinced she’s struck it rich with her paltry haul of gold flakes she’s also thrilled to discover a miniscule pebble of greenstone in her souvenir vial.įurther south, in the village of Hokitika, it soon becomes apparent that this is where the wealth of the region now lies – in the sale of precious greenstone, or pounamu. ![]() Just south of Greymouth, Shantytown Heritage Park relives those boozy, brawling days, with faithfully recreated buildings, heritage train rides and gold panning demonstrations. During this time, there were more than 300 pubs along the coastline – 84 of them alone in one street of Hokitika. Gold in them thar hillsĪfter gold was discovered in the rivers of the West Coast in 1864, this remote part of New Zealand was suddenly not so sleepy as 30,000 optimists and gamblers crossed the Alps to try their luck in the goldfields. After dinner, we are shown around the ghostly bottling plant by a guide sharing tales of its economic heyday, when the malty brew became woven into the fabric of the West Coast culture. ![]() Said to be the original home of craft brewing in New Zealand, dating to 1868, the Greymouth gastropub suffered a major blow in 2020 when commercial operations were moved to Auckland, leaving the West Coast site with just the restaurant and its popular brewery tour – sans beer production. ![]() Ellie squeals with delight as she dodges a projectile of sea spray, scampering along the 1.1-kilometre boardwalk in an effort to stay warm in the biting coastal breeze.Ī warming open fire awaits, however, back in Greymouth at the town’s most beloved icon – Monteith’s Brewery. Meanwhile, the surging tide that pummels the rocky promontory erupts through vertical air shafts in undersea caverns with a booming “whoosh”, an entertaining and humbling reminder of the ocean’s fury. Forty-four kilometres north of Greymouth, along the Great Coast Road – named one of the Top 10 Coastal Drives in the World by Lonely Planet – is a bizarre geological formation: limestone rocks created 30 million years ago when tiny shell fragments were compacted between layers of silt, uplifted by tectonic forces, and etched by the elements into horizontal grooves to resemble stacks of pancakes. Later, we feast on pancakes – but not the fluffy, edible kind. Arriving at the penultimate stop, Moana, we drink in the lakefront scenery from the historic Lake Brunner Hotel, refuelling on beer-battered fish fillets under the glassy gaze of taxidermy stags – a somewhat fitting introduction to the wild, wild west! Like many of the West Coast’s 1.5 million annual overnight visitors, I’ve travelled across the South Island from Christchurch on the TranzAlpine Railway, accompanied by my nine-year-old granddaughter Ellie who is wide-eyed at the snow-capped peaks, braided rivers, vertiginous gorges and the 16 tunnels that flash by on the five-hour cross-country train trip. To others, it’s simply “the Coast” – a remote, untamed frontier that’s sparse in population but rich in scenic and mineral treasures, as well as harbouring 25 per cent of Aotearoa’s conservation land. To its Maori inhabitants, the region is known as Te Tei o Poutini – “the tides of Poutini” – named after a taniwha (or water monster) that swims along the Pacific coast, guarding its people and the spiritual essence of the sacred greenstone found in its rivers. ![]()
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