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.
Te Awamutu literally means "the river cut short", as it marked the end of the navigable section of the Mangapiko Stream. Tainui Maori first settled the Waikato area as early as the fourteenth Century. The Tainui canoe is buried at Kawhia and it was from there that the people consolidated and gradually spread, settling most of the Waikato and the King Country. It was a good area for settlement, with excellent growing conditions and river access. Many pā were established around the Te Awamutu area due to these favourable conditions. The two most important pā at what is now Te Awamutu were Ōtāwhao and Kaipaka.
From 1775 to around 1810 a number of prominent Waikato chiefs and warriors were born. This included the first Maori King, Potatau Te Wherowhero of Ngati Mahuta, Te Rauparaha of Ngati Toa, Kawhia, and Hongi Hika, a Ngapuhi Chief from the north, who played a significant role in Waikato history.
The town grew on the site of Ōtāwhao mission station, established by the Church Missionary Society in 1841. During the Waikato war the mission became headquarters for British troops, and three redoubts were built. In 1864, 4,000 troops were based at Te Awamutu.
St John’s Anglican church was built for the mission in 1853. Soldiers killed at the battle of Ōrākau are buried in the churchyard, which contains memorials to both British and Māori combatants. The Te Awamutu District Museum has the best collection of Waikato war artefacts in New Zealand.
Members of the Second Waikato Militia settled in the area, but after British troops left and the militia was disbanded in 1867, the growth of the town stalled. It revived only when the railway line arrived in 1880.
From the 1880s Te Awamutu developed as a farming centre, with large saleyards. The first cooperative commercial dairy factory in the North Island opened there in November 1882, followed by others.
Te Awamutu became a borough in 1915. It is called ‘Rose Town’ because of its rose gardens, which were established in the 1960s.
The multi cache will take you to Old St John's Church, on Arawata Street in Te Awamutu. It is Waikato's oldest surviving building. Constructed in 1853, it was originally part of the Church Missionary Station. The nearby waypoints are for the two Waikato War memorials. Answer the following questions from these memorials to work out the coordinates for the final, which is hidden in Te Awamutu’s beautiful War Memorial Park.
Find the cache at S38 00.ABC E175 19.DEF where:-
From waypoint 1:
A = Number of words on the first curved line
B = Last digit of the year the monument was erected minus the number that represents the month.
C = There are two years listed on the 11th line. Subtract the first from the last.
From waypoint 2:
D = The last digit of the year mentioned on the memorial
E = The number of letters in the name of the first battle mentioned
F = the number of letters in the name of the second battle mentioned
Checksum: A+B+C+D+E+F = 26
In keeping with the conservation theme of this Geotour, all our caches and logbooks are made of recycled materials, or items we had on hand already.