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 pieces.
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.
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.
Lakes Wānaka and Hāwea were dug by the Waitaha explorer Rākaihautū with his kō (Polynesian digging stick) named Tūwhakaroria. After Waitaha arrived in the Uruao waka at Whakatū (Nelson), Rākaihautū divided his people into two groups. He then led his group down the middle of the island, digging the freshwater lakes of Te Waipounamu (South Island). Lake Hāwea boasted a 'floating island'. Māori looked upon the island as being the handiwork of a taniwha, a water monster. It is said that when Taki was fishing on the shores of the lake, the section on which he stood broke adrift and floated about from place to place in the wind.
The lakes of Wānaka and Hāwea were revered as a stronghold for Waitaha. The transition of Waitaha to Kāi Tahu takiwā was instigated by an attack on Pōtiki-tautahi’s settlement, Paekai. During the 1700s, Pōtikitautahi was the chief of Paekai who guarded the area fiercely. However, when news came that his cousin, Weka, was leading a Kāi Tahu war party from Kaiapoi against Pōtiki-tautahi, he’d begun to prepare for the worst. Upon contact with this war party, Paekai was ransacked, Pōtiki-tautahi killed, and the remainder of the Waitaha people taken prisoner.
Map of the Lakes from the first known map, as was drawn by the southern Kāi Tahu leader Te Huruhuru, 1844.
Numerous kāinga mahinga kai (food gathering places) and kāinga nohoanga (settlements) were located around the lakes. Food gathered included kea, kererū, kākāpō, kiwi, tūī, pūtakitaki (paradise duck), tuna (eel), kāuru (cabbage tree root), aruhe (bracken fern root), pora (Māori turnips) and harakeke (flax). Additional to this, tikumu and taramea were readily available in these areas, enabling Māori to make water and matagouri thorn-proof leggings, fragrant cloaks and perfume. Traditionally Makarora (Makarora River), Omako (Lindis Pass) and Mata-Au (Clutha River) were the main travel routes to and from the lakes and over to the ‘pounamu’ (greenstone) deposits on the West Coast.
Turihuka (Mt Prospect); Hau-matakitaki, Poho-wahine or Kaki-roa (Breast peak); Kahuitamariki (Mt Grandview); Manuhaea- these, among hundreds of others, were names strongly associated with the Lakes and their surrounding catchment. These mountains, synonymous to the stories shared from generation to generation, were landmarks that aided the Māori to find culturally significant landscapes that were akin to the day-to-day life of Waitaha, Kāti Mamoe and Kāi Tahu alike.
LAKE WANAKA
The early European settlers in the 1860s record large clearings being found up the Matukituki River at the head of Lake Wānaka. Three miles up the Matukituki River there once stood a pa called Nehenehe, where Te Puoho captured the Kāi Tahu chief Te Mohene during the famous raid by the northerners on Tuturau near Mataura in 1837. Three of Te Puoho's party were slain at Lake Wānaka and a few of the eeling party were captured at Lake Hāwea. Matetapu Creek is an old burial place.
*Much like Lake Hāwea, Lake Wānaka has been included in the Statutory Acknowledgements of the Kāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act (1998) due to the strong association to the area and its resources. There are, also, three nohoaka near to or along the shores of Lake Wānaka.
LAKE HAWEA
This lake was supposedly named after Kāti Hāwea, one of the earliest iwi to occupy Te Waipounamu before the southern migrations of Kāti Mamoe and Kāi Tahu. The artificial raising of Lake Hāwea in 1958 to store water for hydroelectric power flooded many of their kāinga mahinga kai and kāinga nohoanga, including the renowned Manuhaea kāinga near the neck.
* The Native Land Court, under Chief Judge F. D. Fenton, sitting at Dunedin in 1868, granted Māori a reserve at Hāwea of 100 acres at the site of the old time Manuhaea kāinga.