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.
There is coal in the area around Nightcaps and Ohai – first discovered by Māori, and later mined by European settlers. By 1870 coal was being brought out of the area by horse and wagon to provide for the needs of Southland residents. By 1880 the Nightcaps Coal Company was established and a site for the township was surveyed.
Wairio Railway was the end of the line for public railways. From here several different private railways made their way to various mines. The Ohai Railway Board was formed and purchased several of these railways after the government refused to extend the public railway. The board was funded by local landowners taking out mortgages on their land. The Ohai Railway Board was the only independent railway to make a profit throughout its existence. NZ Railways brought the Ohai Railway Board in 1992. The purchase price of $1.2 million forms the basis of a trust which provides grants for various local community groups.
Coal is a rock that can burn, and it is made from carbon, water and minerals. It was formed millions of years ago when plants fell into peat swamps and were buried by heavy earth and rocks. Over a very long time, the weight of the rocks and heat in the ground turned the plants into coal. Most of the world’s coal was formed 300–350 million years ago. New Zealand coals are much younger – they were made 30–70 million years ago.
This is a MULTI CACHE. Visit some sites of coal mining interest in the Ohai/Nightcaps/Wairio triangle to get the final coordinates, All waypoints are part of the Takitimu Heritage Trail and can be completed in any order. To avoid too much back tracking proceed north to south. You can download the brochure for the Heritage Trail here.
- Ohai township (Takitimu Heritage Trail #10
- McKay Reserve - A = number of mines named on the information board which operated between 1913 and 1947
- A number of pieces of machinery are on display to the west of the information panel
- Tinkertown
- Site of a small village of about 25 families who worked the nearby Black Diamond mine.
- Mining is still active and can be seen on the way to this waypoint or at the nearby traditional cache
- BCDDEF is the number on the power pole here
- Nightcaps
- Sinclair Miner's Cottage
- G is the digital root of the number of short palings on one side of the front door.
- Wairio
- Ohai Railway Board
- The decade that the boardroom extension was added HIJ0's
Once you have visited all 4 locations you can calculate the final coordinates:
S 46 0B.(G+G) H (D+J) E168 0H. A I ((E+F)/2)
About coal: https://teara.govt.nz/en/coal-and-coal-mining