Hauraki Rail Trail – The Karangahake Gorge

Before we left Waihi on Monday 20 July, we went to have a look at the Martha open cast mine. This is a huge, impressive pit from which gold- and silver-containing ore is mined. It is 700 m wide and 260 m deep.

Waihi has a long history of gold mining, going back to the discovery of gold in 1878. Until 1952, mining at the Martha Mine was underground. Over those years, seven vertical shafts were sunk, the deepest down to 600 m, and radiating from them was a network of 175 km of tunnels on 15 horizontal levels.

In 1952 the mine was closed, as the price of gold had dropped. But in the 1980s the price picked up again, and since 1987, the Martha Mine has operated as an open pit.

The Martha Open-cast Mine (photo by John)

The other side of the mine (photo by John)

There is a 4 km track around the rim of the mine that is open to the public, and we probably should have biked around the perimeter, as I believe there are interpretation panels that would have provided interesting information about the mine and its activities. However, there appeared to be no actual activity in the mine that we could see, and there were other things we wanted to do that day.

Now that I am writing this up, and have been reading about the history of Waihi and the mining operations, I think we will just have to make a return visit some time, so that we can ride around the rim, take the Mine Tour, and visit the Waihi Museum. 

On the rise between Waihi’s main street and the rim of the mine, stands the historic Cornish Pumphouse. This was built in 1904 to house steam-driven pumping machinery that removed water from the mines until 1914, when electricity took over operation of the pumps.

The historic Cornish Pumphouse (photo by John)

Looking through the pumphouse

After the pumping machinery was removed in 1930, the building became derelict. In 2006 the building – by now protected by the Historic Places Trust – was moved 300 metres, away from land that had become unstable following the collapse of an adjacent mineshaft.

The Pumphouse was moved in 2006 (click to enlarge)

Also nearby was a reconstructed “poppet head” – a construction built over a mine shaft to raise or lower a cage to transport men, materials and ore into and out of the mine.

John by the poppet head

After this visit, we drove to Waikino Station, from where we intended to bike the Karangahake Gorge track. The café in the beautifully restored station building was a charming place to have morning tea. The room was decorated with local memorabilia, and locally made crafts (for sale).

The Waikino Station Café (photo by John)

Old suitcases on the platform give the station an authentic feel (photo by John)

Just as we were getting the bikes out of the car, a couple of railway maintenance people arrived, with a bogie carrying a digger, and an engine pushing goodness-knows-what. Of course we went over for a chat. They had been working on clearing the track, and said that the train would be running later that day. Unfortunately the timing did not fit into our plans.

One of the men also said that the Paeroa to Thames part of the Hauraki Rail Trail, that we had biked the previous day, was the most boring track he had ever biked – being straight and through a flat landscape “with nothing interesting to see”. Luckily we didn’t find it so.

Track maintenance machinery

Leaving the car in the station carpark, we crossed the bridge and carried on up the trail along the river, from where we had got to two days earlier.

The Ohinemuri River (photo by John)

Heading towards the Karangahake Gorge

It was very pleasant riding on a wide smooth gravel track. The scenery was becoming wilder, and soon we arrived at the Karangahake Tunnel, which is approached across a bridge over the Ohinemuri River. The tunnel disappears under the road (SH2).

The bridge over the Ohinemuri River leads straight into the tunnel (photo by John)

The Karangahake Gorge, viewed from the bridge (photo by John)

The long tunnel (1086 m), completed in 1905, was built to transport mining materials and gold in and out of Waihi. Although there are some lights in the tunnel, they are quite widely spaced and do not light it up very well. Our bikes have excellent lights on them, and we had brought good torches, which helped.

Even so, the tunnel caused John some serious problems with his balance, and although he did manage to bike the whole way (rather than getting off and walking), he emerged at the other end looking rather green round the gills. The imbalance makes him feel quite nauseous. And to make things worse for him, there was another high, former railway bridge at the exit of it. “God, that was awful. I’m not going back through there”, he said.

The Karangahake Tunnel is over a kilometre long (photo by John)

Luckily we did not have to go back through the tunnel, as there was a loop track to get us back to Waikino. On the way, though, there was plenty more to see.

The track led us past the remains of the Crown Mines Battery. This was a gold and silver processing plant, the first in the world to use cyanide treatment (sounds like an environmental disaster, doesn’t it), and apparently very successful at the time.

The remains of the Crown Mines Battery

Looking upriver towards the bridge that joins the trail to SH2 (photo by John)

We arrived at the Karangahake junction, where there was access to the trail from SH2, a park and several track options. We followed a sign that pointed towards the Windows Walk. We didn’t know much about that walk, except that I had read that this was something we “should not miss”.

The track led along the bank of the Waitawheta River, and at first it was quite reasonable, but some distance down, it became very narrow, and we had to dismount and walk our bikes along the path.

At first the track along the Waitawheta River was quite manageable … (photo by John)

… but beyond this point it became too narrow to bike (photo by John)

The track was literally carved out of the gorge walls, only barely wide enough for us walking beside our bikes. But we kept going, because the place was so beautiful, and we wanted to know where it would end up. At various places we could peer into mining tunnel entrances.

The very narrow path is carved out of the soaring gorge walls (photo by John)

One of the mining tunnels (photo by John)

We went across a suspension bridge, and soon after, we arrived at some steps with a sign pointing up towards the Windows Walk. This is where we decided we had gone far enough with our bikes in hand. We didn’t want to leave the bikes there, although there wasn’t another soul around, and they would have been quite safe. But the Windows Walk involved lots more tunnels, which John was not keen to explore. So we turned around.

John climbed some way up the steps – just for the view (photo by John)

The return trip across the suspension bridge

Soaring canyon walls showing some of the “windows”, behind which lurk the mine tunnels

Back at the Karangahake junction, we followed direction to the Karangahake Tunnel Loop Walk, which we hoped would take us back to Waikino. However we first had to cross a bridge that did not appear to be designed for bikes. We had to carry the bikes up about a dozen steps. A bit of a mission with our quite heavy e-bikes. John managed to carry his bike up (just), but I needed help.

We had to carry our bikes up the steps to get across this bridge over the Waitawheta River
(photo by John)

The remains of the Woodstock Battery (photo by John)

Once across, we found another lot of battery remains, the Woodstock Battery. I had serious misgivings about the suitability of the track for biking – it was narrow, very bumpy with lots of rocks and tree roots, and quite steep in places.

While pushing our bikes up the hill, we were overtaken by a walker who was obviously a local, and I asked him if the track ahead was OK for bikes. He told us that it would be OK further along, so we persisted. I must say that pushing a fairly heavy e-bike uphill on a lumpy track was hard work, even with the walk-assist! (Walk-assist is a feature which propels the bike along at 6 km/hr, making it easier to push it uphill, but with my gammy hand I find it hard to keep a finger on the button that makes it work.)

At one stage, having gone over a hill and come back down to river level again, before heading uphill again, the track became so narrow that we couldn’t even walk beside our bikes for fear of keeling off the edge. We had to carefully manoeuvre them ahead of us. A bit scary!

The track became too narrow to walk beside our bikes (photo by John)

Finally, finally, we arrived at the end of the loop, and we re-joined the main track on the other side of the tunnel. It was then an easy ride back to Waikino.

Back on the track to Waikino (photo by John)

Before going back to the car, we explored the historic Victoria Stamping Battery site.  In 1898, this was the largest quartz crushing plant for gold extraction in Australasia. It processed ore from the Martha Mine. When the mine was closed in 1952, operations continued on a reduced scale, but then ceased in 1955. Now, all that’s left are the foundations and various bits of machinery.

Would this be part of an ore crushing machine?

This link provides a very clear map of the site. The most interesting structure was the remains of the cyanide agitation tanks (No. 7 on the map). It is like a gigantic honeycomb of concrete hexagons with enormous steel funnels coming down into them. I don’t pretend to understand what the process was, but the construction was fascinating. No matter which “window” you looked through, you could always see across and sideways to the other side.

The cyanide agitation tanks complex

One of the huge, magnificently rusty funnels (photo by John)

This shows the hexagonal construction of the “cells”

Somehow, this reminded me a bit of a cathedral’s buttresses

We wandered around the lower part of the site, looking at foundations of buildings and what I think may have been a tail race, to carry water back to the river.

Foundations of buildings (photo by John)

The tail race – I think (photo by John)

Next we climbed up a level to where there is a museum in what was the transformer house. The museum was not open (open Wednesdays and Sundays only). There was a narrow tram track (on which people can have rides on museum days) around the site, and a number of wagons and wheel bases were on display.

The transformer house and various bits of machinery (photo by John)

One of the ore wagons (photo by John)

We climbed still further up the hill to the ore kilns. These are huge holes in the ground where gold-carrying quartz was heated to make it easier to crush. Tunnels ran underneath to collect the rocks, for the next process.

The ore kilns are now under cover to preserve them

A gantry allows people to look down into the kilns (photo by John)

The kilns are lined with bricks, but are now overgrown with mosses and ferns
(photo by John)

An information board explains the process (click to enlarge)

View from the ore kilns site. You can just make out the hexagonal construction of
the cyanide agitation tanks in the middle of the top third of the photo.
Click to enlarge (photo by John)

On our way back down to the bridge to take us back to the car, we went past lots more rusty bits of machinery, scattered about the lower site.

More rusty relics – and I don’t mean John!

In completing the Karangahake Gorge Loop, we did not get to ride all the way to Paeroa, which had been our original plan. We had biked only 17 km, and some of that was not even biking, as we had to walk quite a bit of it. I think we will definitely have to come back and explore this area some more.

But now it was time to head to our next destination – Tauranga or Mount Maunganui, where we intended to spend a day exploring the city's cycle tracks. We stopped at Waihi Beach on the way. Very beautiful, and very popular in the summer, but the place was pretty much dead at this time of the year.

Waihi Beach (photo by John)

We found a motel in Mount Maunganui, and went for a walk near the beach in search of dinner in the evening.

The beach at Mount Maunganui at dusk (photo by John)

Finally, here is a photo of John’s “charging station” at our accommodation – five devices off just two power points: two bike batteries on one power point, and his laptop, iPad, and iPhone on the other.

John’s charging station (photo by John)

Hauraki Rail Trail – Paeroa to Thames

On Sunday 19 July, we had planned to take the bikes on the historic train that runs between Waihi and Waikino, and then bike through the Karangahake Gorge and on to Paeroa. But it didn’t happen, we had to change our plan.

The Goldfields Historic Railway is the last vestige of a railway that was originally built in 1905 to transport mining materials, goods and people to and from Waihi, which was then one of the largest gold and silver mining operations in New Zealand.

The railway is now maintained and managed by volunteers who run the train as a tourist attraction, especially during holiday times. Until the cycling track between Waihi and Waikino was completed (in late 2013), cyclists riding between Paeroa and Waihi, had to put their bikes on the train for the final stretch.

Unfortunately, when we arrived at the Waihi Railway station, there was no one there, and there was no train to be seen. A phone call to the number listed on the information board established that it would not be running at all that day. We heard later that debris on the line as a result of bad weather and a minor derailment the previous day had required maintenance to be carried out, hence there would be no train trips.

Disappointing, but not the end of the world. We could ride the Paeroa to Thames leg of the trail instead. So we went back to the motel, loaded the bikes into the car and drove to Paeroa. 

“World famous in New Zealand”. Paeroa’s original claim to fame – the L&P soft drink –
takes pride of place in the town (photo by John)

The distance from Paeroa to Thames is 33 km, and the plan was to bike until we’d covered a goodly distance, then turn around. At least that’s what I thought. After about 25 km, I figured that would do us and I would have been happy to go back, but John wanted to go the whole distance. I think he was looking for some sort of record (for us), and we sure achieved that. We ended up riding a total of 72 km – the longest one-day ride we had done to date.

The track is quite straight – with just two very slight kinks in the whole 33 km. The landscape is flat. If it wasn’t for the hills in the distance, one could imagine oneself in Holland.

The track is quite straight – for miles! (photo by John)

It is mainly dairy and beef country – we saw lots of cattle, but very few sheep

There were a lot of bridges over small streams or water-filled ditches, which relieved the monotony of continuous flatness, as they were all raised a fair height above the water.

One of the many bridges (photo by John)

Same bridge, different view (photo by John)

After about 10 km, we diverted off the track into Hikutaia, where we had morning tea on the sunny deck of “The Convenient Cow” café. It was nicely sheltered from the cold southerly.

The Convenient Cow café in Hikutaia (photo by John)

Other interruptions to the flow of the straight track were the many farm and stock crossings. They occurred where the track crossed a road or farm track between paddocks – presumably for dairy herds to make their way to the milking sheds. There would be locked gates and concrete cattle stops on each side of the farm track. The farm tracks were often muddy.

At first John would dismount each time and walk across the cattle stop, as narrow spaces cause him some bother because of his impaired sense of balance. However, I didn’t stop to get off. I just rode through them. Eventually, he got the knack of it too.

John dismounts to negotiate the paired cattle stops on either side of a farm track

The sign at each cattle stop

There are several advantages to riding this trail in the winter. One of them is the lack of people. Apparently, this trail gets very busy during the summer time. We had the place to ourselves. I think we saw fewer than half a dozen cyclists the whole day. The other thing I love about this time of year is the stark beauty of the bare deciduous trees. They look so majestic, and yet so delicate.

Love those trees!

Toetoe plumes waving in the southerly (photo by John)

We came across a small group of cows standing in a strip of muddy, squishy ground between the track and a nice green paddock. It bothered me to see them there without anything to eat. It looked like all the hay they might have been fed had been either trampled into the mud, or blown through the fence onto the track. A couple of the cows were craning their necks through the fence to try to reach the hay on the side of the track. I know my effort was pathetic, but I gathered up some of the hay, and held handfuls out to them. The first cow was rather suspicious of me, but then she took the hay, and soon several other cows came along to check it out as well.

This one is for my friend Pat, who loves cows (photo by John)

After 33 km of open rural spaces, we arrived at Thames. The track changed to smooth concrete, and we went through a subway under the state highway. It was several kilometres before we arrived at the historic Shortland Wharf (built in 1868), at the mouth of the Kaueranga River.

The sign near the highway underpass

View across the Firth of Thames, from Shortland Wharf

We expected to find a nice café or two at the wharf, but there was nothing there that appealed, so we rode through the town to a café at the far end – Café Melbourne – where we had lunch.

We were on our way back by 2pm. This time we were riding into a cold southerly headwind.

Although I had used the level 3 assist for some of the way there, John suggested we should just use level 2 going back, forcing us to pedal harder, against the wind. He was a bit concerned that we might not have enough battery power to get us home if we used up too much energy. Actually, we made it back with plenty of spare capacity left in the batteries. Despite the headwind (sometimes crosswind), it was not too bad plodding along on level 2.

Another 19 km back to Paeroa!

Somewhere along the way, a thoughtful soul had nailed some plastic garden chairs to some trees, presumably to give cyclists the chance to sit down on something marginally more comfortable than a bike saddle. We made grateful use of them for a little while.

A brief respite for the nether regions … (photo by John)

The view from the plastic chairs (photo by John)

It was just after 4 pm when we got back to Hikutaia’s Convenient Cow Café. I would have been happy to just keep on going all the way to Paeroa, but John said we needed the break - and yes, we did need a break. The knees had started to complain by about 50 km, and we still had quite a way to go.

So we had a “real fruit ice cream”, which was huge (the equivalent of three scoops the lady told me after she’d given us them) and it took us a long time to eat it. Meanwhile a man came into the café saying he was waiting to pick up some bikers who were due there shortly. I asked if he drove the shuttle. He sounded surprised, and said yes, he did drive the shuttle but not today. It turned out he drove an airport shuttle between Tauranga and Auckland, not the cyclists’ shuttle along the Hauraki Rail Trail. If he had been, and he was going to Paeroa, we would have hitched a ride. 

By 4:40 we were on our way again, another 13 km to go, and not much more daylight to do it in. I put on my parka as by now it was bitterly cold. We cranked up the e-assist to 3, and later to 4, and pedalled along quite well. We rode into the outskirts of Paeroa just as the sun dipped down below the horizon at 5:15. By the time we got back to the car, we had biked 72.5 km - the longest ride we have done in one day. My knees, hands and derrière certainly felt like it too! But despite these discomforts, we felt quite chuffed with our achievement.