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.
On the edge of a bluff above the township of Otautau you will find nothing more than the local cemetery. But in 1850 this area was surveyed as a prospective settlement by a party from HMS Acheron. There was a lot to recommend this site – room for expansion, easy access, good views, water supply, and it was above the river so safe from floodwaters.
But Hodgkinson was not to be. Any town here had to meet the needs of those passing through, and travellers did not want to cross the river and climb a hill before getting rest, food and water for themselves and their animals after a full day of travel.
So the township of Otautau grew on the banks of the river below.
To find the final coordinates of this cache you will need to complete the Adventure Lab finding out about the town that is (https://adventurelab.page.link/g14D) and collect the numbers at each location.
Final coordinates are somewhere on the map at S 46 0H.FHG E 168 0I.DJE
Hodgkinson is just one of many townships around New Zealand which were planned but never built.