Waihi has been a major gold mining town for a long time. The first mines, opened in the 1870's were named for Martha, the niece of the successful stakeholder. The mine didn't last that long before it became uneconomical to work, but around it and other strikes in the area, Waihi boomed into a sizeable town.
In the 1970's the price of gold rocketed and this seam became profitable again. The huge, open-cast mine is still known as Martha and is being worked today.
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From Whakatane, elated and exhausted, we headed to Tauranga, where we met Beryl off her bus from Wellington. Despite her nine hour trip she was jaunty, saying the bus had been very comfortable. Her sister, Pip's Aunt Zoe, is buried in Tauranga.
While Pip and Beryl visited the grave, Sarah explored a little. This is the splendid prow of the waka that adorns the river front.
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We travelled back in great comfort after a good lunch. (Local food, recyclable container.) This is the harbour of Whakatane from just inside the bar. There is obviously a good deep channel and mooring buoys, but we don't know all the details of course.
The skipper told us that where we anchored off White Island there is about 10m of water. There is quite a shelf but then it drops off very fast. And to the east, less than a mile away, there is 1500 metres depth. This is the trench created by the Pacific Plate being pushed under the Australian one, the faultline which itself is feeding the volcano.
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This was a very hard place to live and not many have tried it. The Europeans tried to mine sulphur here, but in 1913 their camp was wiped out, either by a landslide or an eruption. No-one knows, because the tragedy was only discovered when the supply ship reached the island and found all the men gone, and their buildings wiped out. The miners either were buried by the eruption, or pushed into the sea where they would have been eaten by the sharks quite common in the area.
The only survivor was the cat, known as Peter. He was taken back to the mainland, where everyone wanted to breed from him. He sired many kittens and died at a great age, known far and wide as Peter the Great.
These logs get washed ashore in the storms. There are a few remains of a later mining effort from the early 1920's, but the business went bankrupt. Now no-one lives on White Island.
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This little stream shows up the colours deposited by oxides and other compounds as it runs from a fumarole on the crater floor towards the sea. A magic carpet.
Next to it runs another little stream that is almost clear of colour; its source is much higher in the crater wall and it is not filled with material from fumaroles and upswellings directly above the magma chamber.
Both the streams are acidic, however, with a pH of 2 or 3, about the same as your stomach. You wouldn't want to drink it.
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This is the mud in one spot in the crater, part of a larger mud pool that is constantly in motion, and the whole crater of mud is changing shape almost daily. We saw mud pools at Orakei Korako and in Rotorua but because of the drought they were pretty dry. Here on Whakaari not only is there plenty of rain, but steam feeds these pools from below.
White Island is a place to teach you that the rocks themselves are alive, that all of the environment is dynamic, and that the equilibrium of terra firma is pretty fragile. The colours, smells and shapes here are all in flux, and the great majority of them are chemical, created by minerals and water, rather than the algae and other life-forms that visibly push change in most places.
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This picture gives some idea of the scale of the place. The crater lake is hidden behind rocks against the back wall. There is a little man on the track (a very committed photographer, closely watched by a patient guide).
This photo is taken from the highest spot on the crater floor, about a third of the way from the back wall to the landing place.
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At the back of the crater floor is a smaller crater. This was formed by a major explosion in 1976, which left a cone about 120m deep. This gradually got filled up by rubble (both ejecta and stuff washed off the crater walls by rain), ash and smaller stones. Inevitably the blocked vent exploded again.
There were then heavy rains in 2000 which left a small puddle over the vent. This was expected to disappear. Instead, it has become a permanent feature, inasmuch as anything is permanent here. The lake is fed by steam coming out of the vent which condenses on contact with the water. From the surface, water is lost in steam or ordinary evaporation, but re-fed by rain water.
The lake is not salt, but has a pH of -0.5. That's serious acid, of the sulphuric and hydrochloric variety. The day we were there it was still, but sometimes it is belching steam which is very unpleasant to breathe. Certainly this was an area where the gas masks came in handy.
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All across the crater floor are humps of materiel, left by eruptions and landslides. The hot steam finds a way through these, creating fumaroles which deposit the sulphur and other compounds. The surface of these mounds is a thin crust, which we were continually warned not to walk on. Apparently a couple of weeks before a tourist ignored this and found himself ankle deep in very hot mud.
You can put your hand over this vent (which is close to the relatively stable path), and feel the heat; you can't get really close because the steam is scalding.
All this sulphur? Yes: White Island is a smelly place. It reeks of sulphur compounds. It is a bitter, acrid smell, though, quite distinct from the rotten eggs steam that sometimes hangs over Rotorua.
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We have so many pictures of this extraordinary place, it's hard to pick them out. (But you can see them all when we next meet up!)
There is very little life in these craters; until 2006, the entire crater was covered in thick, fine ash; the guides could walk from the landing to the far crater wall in bare feet. But then there was a significant eruption and now the surface is sharp, crumbly pumice.
The crater as a whole was three smaller craters, and you can see the collapsed walls from earlier eruptions, often marked by horizontal strata showing where lakes reached at various times. All over the crater are places where steam is escaping, active vents from the magma chamber about 3.5km below the surface. This was one of the biggest, at the bottom of part of the main wall of the crater.
The yellow is sulphur crystals, formed at 94.5ºC; that's how hot the steam is. The white is calcium sulphide (or possibly sulphate: a failure of note-taking there), the gypsum used in building.
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You go ashore in this RIB tender, in groups of nine. Two boat loads makes one group with a guide, and there were six boat loads, or 54 people on our trip.
You can see behind the tender the landing stage. On the far side are some ladders; you clamber up these onto the concrete jetty. A section is broken away and replaced by a fairly narrow iron bridge, with a good solid handhold. From the end of the jetty you clamber across about 30m of boulders to get ashore.
We had maybe a one metre swell in the bay and yet the guides and drivers handled it all immaculately. It's not an arrival for the faint-hearted!
As you see, everyone is wearing hard hats. It's a requirement of access to the island, together with gas masks. The volcano is constantly throwing out steam laden with acids, and can at any time eject lumps of rock. They hand the hats and masks out before you leave the main vessel, and take them back on return.
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Whakaari is the Maori name for the island, which is NZ's most active volcano. The boat anchors in this bay, and this view is the main crater.
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