Tuesday, August 25, 2009

On the Gold Trail


A year ago, I was flying in something that could best be described as a ‘white mosquito’; the smallest 6 seater in the Air New Zealand fleet, where the fat pilot had to double as an air host. I was travelling to a town that should have been named after a blossom of a flower ‘Kohe-mara’, a native bush bramble; but instead, was mis-spelled by the British Surveyor; and unceremoniously Kumara became instead, which translates ‘sweet potato’ in native Maori! Veritably, a town named ‘potato’ would hardly strike in the mind as being one of New Zealand’s best kept secret as a travel destination; in fact Kumara is perched perfectly on the adventure trail. 1 hour’s East is Arthur’s Pass, winding through the bowels of the Southern Alps, where turquoise coloured melt water lakes shelter beneath towering snow capped mountains. To the South across a patch of temperate fern forests are breath taking rivers of ice; Franz Joseph and Fox Glaciers creeping on the backs of Mt. Tasman and Mt. Cook, I was even luckier to afford a chopper flight and panoramically view the true grandeur of the glaciers as they gouge their way through the mountains. To the North at Punakaiki, there are some spectacular coastal geomorphologic formations in the limestone; ‘blowholes’, where the coast seemingly puffs in unison as the waves squeeze water between the narrow orifices in the limestone, funneled to the surface to shoot up as a fountain of spray; like the blow hole of a whale. But what makes Kumara all the more special is its old world charm, little changed since the 1800’s, the time of a gold rush, unprecedented in the Southern Hemisphere.

Forlorn relics of the boom; dilapidated houses, crumbling fireplaces, rotting horse carriages all punctuated my walk along the desolate streets. I checked in The Empire Hotel, the last of the 42 erstwhile ‘dance houses’, run more like a home stay today. The hotel pub still served as the town’s watering hole, where the town met and made merry, much as they did a century ago. The wall paper was still original, and the walls were lined with black and white picture scenes unrecognizable today, the original ‘Volunteer Fire Brigade’, the ‘Horse Carriage Ambulance’, the ‘Amateur Rugby Team’, images of a bustling American Mid-western town conjured up in my mind, but at the same time an eerie sense a ghost town lurks in the air today, a stark contrast from the vibrancy that was a hallmark in the pictures. The original safe still sat behind the cashier, where back in the day, if you came straight from the bush without any money, you could still buy a drink for a flake of gold in exchange! I paid for my beer with my credit card and sat amongst the locals; descendents of the fortune seekers, who were equally interested in the ‘brown man who speaks English’. From a bustling town of fortune seekers in the 1900’s, just 200 descendents subsist today, relics of the past themselves, their lifestyle has little changed; hunting their own meat, growing their own veggies and fishing in their unique technique- ‘kite fishing’. If at all they needed money, they either fossicked for gold or sold possum pelt. This is so far away from the rat race of the world I am familiar with, no internet, even our satellite phone found signals hard to catch! There isn’t much to want in a rural lifestyle, besides good tucker and some warmth. Possibly the only reason why the pub still functions is because no one in the village has yet made his own good enough beer!

The gold fever has never really subsided; you cannot have a conversation with a local without them erupting with stories of the gold days of yore. All of Kumara cannot remember it, but they do know of the day the post office clock stopped. While sluicing, miners uncovered a 3000 ton boulder, they toppled the erratic, from where it had been dropped by a glacier millions of years earlier. The thud of the rock as it hit the ground was heard in Kumara four kilometers away, and the shockwaves knocked the mechanism of the clock- and time stood still. True or not true, gold created Kumara, and though commercial gold mining and dredging petered out by the 1950’s, there will forever be people like me, thrill seekers, eager to take out a pan into the bush seeking the rivers blessings fossicking a few flakes of gold.

At a time when this land was still Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud, Maori tribes flocked to the West Coast in search for Ponamu, or Jade. These warrior tribes had no metallurgy skills, and so river beds and mountain sides were scoured instead, as nature blessed this part of Aotearoa with the hardest and highest grade of greenstone for making ‘Toki’ (adaze), ‘Mere’(dagger), ‘Tai’aha’ (spear head). For them, Gold was just some dirt. Folklore or not in 1863, two men digging to build an illicit whisky still, discovered gold. Life was never the same in New Zealand and a gold rush followed, soon the population burgeoned to about 20000. Gold hysteria drove people so insane, that once a rumour of gold under the main street drove the town’s people to dig up the street overnight! And here I was, more than a century later, ironically part of a exploratory team drilling a ‘wildcat well’ under a riverbed in a quest to find mans newfangled treasure; ‘black gold’!

I was going to a place aptly named ‘Goldsborough’. We hiked through the regenerated native bush with our pans, a sluice box and a shovel, now and then, walking through the streams, Tom and Tina didn’t want footprints to lead anyone to their ‘secret spot’. Our feet trampled upon a carpet of spongy moss, softer than a rug, while thick foliage of ‘Ponga’ or the Silver Tree Fern, (the iconic emblem of many New Zealand sports teams), blocked the sun out, lichen like shaggy wool draped themselves all over the Rimu and Manuka trees. Back in the day a 6mm grating size was used in the sluice box to catch gold; we were fossicking for everything that didn’t get collected. Tina looked for a spot, which I mistakenly thought was at random, rolled a boulder aside, scooped up a shovel of gravel, along with a little of the underlying clay- ‘Papah’. Clay? I wondered. Gold has a specific gravity of 19.3, meaning it is 19.3 times heavier than water, making it always settle to the bottom, between sand grains to eventually rest on impermeable clay.

We each sat on a boulder, I tried mimicking her moves, first drowning the pan under water, jigging it furiously to force settle the gold to the bottom. She then dipped the pan in and out of the water at a slight angle, the sweeping water, washing away the top layer of gravel away each time. After a few cycles, all that was left in the pan is thick layer of heavy’s; jet black sand overlain by a thin veneer of translucent purple-red coarse sand size grains. The black was iron sand, and the ruby colours were actually of small tetrahedral garnets…. Wow I exclaimed…perfect natural garnet crystals! Tina giggled, flicking the garnets back into the water reminding me that we had come for gold instead! She swirled the water in the pan and the black sand moved, a glint caught my eye…. I struggled to seat my buttocks properly with the excitement. She swirled the pan a few more times and what stood grounded to the bottom of the pan was the shiniest specks that reflected sunlight, blinding me, fine dust…gold dust! Just the sight of gold had already made me feeling rich! Though a little crestfallen to count only 7 needle head specks, I asked her, “so we throw that out and try again?” She looked back at me horrified!

Almost immediately my panning assumed a discerningly serious posture, it took a bit more skill that I expected; light hands and a strong back to stay hunched, my legs already freezing in the melt water. My hands were clumsy, but I did it really slowly, I didn’t want to wash away any gold in my haste. Tina had gone through 2 pans, when I whirled a little water around the pan and there I see this yellow shiny grain, sitting snuggly in the sand. It was massive compared to the specks Tina was panning! I shrieked in excitement, and hobbled towards Tina. In a glance and a toothy grin she said “the geologist has found himself some ‘fools gold’!” Ok maybe that was pyrite, but what about the other shiny flake reflecting in the pan; “and this?”, still grinning she said, “and that’s a flake of mica’. I slunk my tail between my legs. It was only after an hour, did I get the hang of panning, much like how you pan rice, the lighter husk flies off leaving heavier rice grains, except this is done under water. And then when the black sand swirled, light reflected, a flake distinctly more yellow, brighter than the sun, heavier than the black sand, it met all the criteria to be classed as my 1st flake of real gold. It was smaller than a pinhead to be honest, but it will always be a 24 carat gold speck!

Meanwhile Tom had already set up the sluice box. This was much quicker method, but a lot more exhausting as we shoveled sediment into the sluice, allowing the stream flow to naturally wash the sand and rocks away, leaving the heavier gold on the astro turf bottom. We did this until my arms said enough. As we dismantled the box and removed the Astroturf, Tom pointed out a flake of gold the size of my finger nail stuck to the turf! I was thunderstruck! Emptying the contents in a pan, expertly he had within minutes only black sands left in his pan, my eyes were glued to the pan as with every swirl it seemed as if gold was sprouting from underneath! It’s spooky, the yellow dust had something seductive that made me crave for more- gold fever! My hunger was insatiable; I had to be dragged out of the stream even after an uninterrupted 5 hours. Tom estimated what we aggregated was worth a cool 300$. The astounding part of the experience was that they presented me all gold we had collected. Ecstatic when I returned to Goa, I showed it off in a small glass bottle, it didn’t seem much after all that effort, but then had it been easy, gold would have been cheap wouldn’t it?

It was my last day in Kumara and raining cats, I was ‘rigging down’ my Unit, when a cobble caught my eye. It was Ponamu; mellow green in sight and cold to touch. Importantly I could lift it unaided, so the Maori council wouldn’t mind. I drove over to Tina’s and handed her the cobble, much to her protest. It’s the least I could do.

I cannot tell you if we did find any ‘black gold’, but I what I did realize was that the richness in Kumara was never under their feet, but by in the people’s hearts.

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