Continued from Part One.
Next stop was Riverton at the very bottom of the South Island, where we were based for the next three weeks – many thanks to Helen and Ray for the generous use of their holiday home. We collected many beach stones from the Riverton area and from nearby Gemstone Beach at Orepuki. The weather was cool and windy at times but not bad enough to discourage stone collecting. We met a handful of fellow stone collectors at Gemstone Beach and exchanged greetings and stories. We also spotted dolphins swimming off the beaches at Riverton.
While based at Riverton, we took a day trip eastwards to Waipapa Point, Slope Point and Curio Bay, the latter being well known for its petrified forest that is uncovered at each low tide.
One day we walked the Long Hilly Track through an old gold mining area near Orepuki. This included part of the 40 kilometre long Port’s water race, built in the 1870s and 1880s with the help of Chinese miners. We visited the Riverton Museum and found an excellent display on the Chinese goldminers. On a visit to the Southland Museum in Invercargill, we saw a natural history room that included a lot of local geological displays and information.
On the trip north, on the way home, we stopped off to see the Moeraki Boulders in North Otago. Some sea mist came down even though it was the middle of the day. The boulders are large spherical rocks, concretions that have been exposed through shoreline erosion from coastal cliffs. They consist of mud, fine silt and clay, cemented by calcite. The degree of cementation varies from being relatively weak in the interior of a boulder to quite hard at its outside rim. The boulders are cracked and eventually fall apart after having been exposed for some time.
A day was spent at Birdlings Flat, near Christchurch, where we collected quite a few stones for polishing. We walked to the point where the stony beach meets the volcanic mass of Banks Peninsula, briefly disturbing a resting seal. The tide was low enough for us to look at the stones in the small bay past the seal.
We also took the opportunity to visit Akaroa on Banks Peninsula where we saw thick clouds rolling slowly down over the hills.
The road further up the east coast of the South Island, through Kaikoura, was open – it had to be rebuilt after the November 2016 magnitude 7.8 earthquake as well as additional landslides caused by recent storms. So we were able to view the earthquake aftermath, including the land that been raised out of the sea. Some parts of the coast were uplifted by six metres. One of the places we visited on the Kaikoura peninsula was Point Kean, well-known for its seal colony. A large area of many hectares/acres now lies dry where it once was under the sea.
Then it was home across Cook Strait, a choppy but not uncomfortable crossing.
