The Tuia Mātauranga Pōkai Whenua GeoTour follows the footsteps of early explorers of Aotearoa New Zealand taking you to places where leaders of the past searched for food, resources and ways to adapt and survive in this new land.
Use the Pōkai Whenua GeoTour as your classroom to explore the stories of the past, in the present, to preserve what is unique in Aotearoa New Zealand for the future.
Collect the codewords to get the Geocoin puzzle piece.
To be able to complete this GeoTour and receive your special Geocoin collectable, remember to take a note of the codeword placed in the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded here.
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63 of the 150 Pōkai Whenua GeoTour caches will contain a randomly placed special FTF token (a replica of the Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour commemorative coin). This is yours to keep! If you find more than one, you might consider leaving it for the next person who finds the cache.
Maketū is located in the Western Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. Maketū has an estuary from which the Kaituna River used to flow. It is also adjacent to Newdicks Beach located on the southeastern side of Okurei Point.
Maketū is rich in ancestral Maori culture, specifically the Te Arawa tribe. Maketū was one of the landing sites of the Te Arawa canoe. The Chief who led the voyage of the Te Arawa waka from Hawaiki to New Zealand/Aotearoa was known as Tametekapua. Many Māori settled in Maketū, but some continued their journey inland, using the Kaituna River as far as Rotorua. Maketū is named after an ancient kūmara (sweet potato) pit in Hawaiki, the Māori ancestral homeland.
Arawa was one of the great ocean-going voyaging canoes used in the early Pacific migrations that settled New Zealand.
Many Māori iwi and hapū based in the Rotorua and Bay of Plenty areas trace their ancestry from the people of the Te Arawa canoe.
On the voyage to New Zealand there was a drama that occurred between Tama-te-kapua, Ngātoro-i-rangi (who was tricked into navigating this waka, rather than commanding the Tainui canoe) and his wife Kearoa. During the voyage Ngātoro-i-rangi raised up a storm in which all the kūmara carried on board the canoe were lost overboard, save for a few that were in a small kete being clutched by Whakaotirangi. Immediately after the calming of the seas, a shark (known as an arawa) was seen in the water. Ngātoro-i-rangi immediately renamed the waka Te Arawa, after this shark, which then accompanied the waka to Aotearoa, acting in the capacity of a kai-tiaki (guardian).
Note: This cache is placed on private property with the owners permission - please be respectful and do not go any further onto the property than necessary to retrieve the cache.