Hokitika life continues

 So here we are still in Hokitika and I am still working, ACP is working on his insurance claim (the eye operation and associated costs from last year) as well as being in charge of all motorhome-bitching tasks. He has listed them on a small whiteboard that he purchased (without a business case, I might add) and then stuck with velcro (also an unauthorised purchase) on the pantry door - I say pantry, but it used to be the wardrobe until we put shelves in it so there was room for enough food and ingredients.
I don't think the list is there to remind him of what needs to be done, after all, they are things that are obvious. I do think they are there to notify me that he is not inactive and that he is overwhelmed by the load - and to give me the information that he certainly doesn't have time to be cooking dinner every night ...

Just so I know how arduous his day is ...

 

The weather app on my phone (NZ Metservice) said it was going to be pants over this last week - exaggeration, or otherwise they get their forecasting info further inland where the weather is wetter, closer to the foothills of the mountains. But it did rain off and on, so it has been a bit of Russian roulette about whether I will get rained on walking the 20 minutes or so to and from work. On the only day it was persisting down at home time, the lovely Fiona drove me back. She is a gem!

But boy, the rain on the roof of the motorhome sounds very very loud - just like it does on the narrowboat. 

However, to prove that, even though the forecast said rain, rain, rain, here's what the walk to work looked like on a couple of days this week. (I have stopped biking for the moment - even though it's quicker, I am not a confident cyclist anymore and I find I am more relaxed if I walk. Perhaps I will get over myself in the next couple of weeks and start cycling again, but at the moment, by foot is good.)

It was actually dark when I took this photo as I was leaving for work, but the flash was automatic and I couldn't be arsed trying to change it ... Remember that patience is my middle name, folks!

 

Getting lighter as I walk down Revell St.

The forecast said it would be raining all day but no, it didn't. Note to self: Make sure the phone is level before taking photos otherwise it seems as though we are in Pisa ...

 

Nearly at work, and those mountains are just spellbinding.

We went out for a walk that Sunday in between showers, so we weren't feeling totally cooped up. The motorhome is lovely, but you can either be in bed or at the table, unless you are in the bathroom or the galley ... So down Revell Street we went and then through a little open arcade to Beach Street. Then back around Gibson Quay, down Tancred St and on to Weld St.

Next stop Australia - we cannot see the lovely Kirsty though, dammit!!

Well, sometimes people don't respond to the official warning signs about there being lots of rips and no lifeguards, and therefore need multiple messages ... I wouldn't swim where there are crocodiles -would you, even if you were in your 20s and 10 foot tall and bullet proof?

This beautiful seat is in the shape of feathers and is down by the beach.

 

This bench was built and installed in the pedestrian arcade to commemorate a local engineer, Mort Cruikshank - I remember Jim talking about him. Mort always had lots of projects on the go and was ready to lend a helping hand to anyone who asked. He apparently kept copious notes in shorthand.

Hokitika Clocktower at the junction of Weld and Sewell Streets. A lovely structure, I reckon.

This week we went to the play Daylight Atheist, by Tom Scott. I hadn't read anything about it before we went - mistake! It was autobiographical and very very confronting. Not because of the title - that barely featured. But because of what I saw the theme as being: the effects of abandonment, how they are lifelong and affect everyone in an abandoned person's life, if the person doesn't consciously and constantly choose to respond differently.

On Thursday night the week before last, we went to see a movie about the town of Waiuta - you probably won't remember, but it was the abandoned gold mine site at Waiuta that first brought me to Hokitika back in 2016 to project manage the clean up of the site which was one of the NZ's most contaminated sites - extremely toxic arsenic abounded all over the place, in the soil, in the swampy area adjacent to where the buildings had been, in the abandoned timbers from the destroyed buildings. 

The movie is called Whispers of Gold and it is being shown around NZ. Eventually it may end up on TV here, and hopefully eventually on you.tube or some such. If it comes to a town near you or if it appears on TV or on the net, do watch it. It is pretty good.

There is a group called Friends of Waiuta who will not let the place be lost to memory - they hold reunions, they make movies (Whispers of Gold is the third one), they publish books. 

Many of the members of Friends of Waiuta were little kids living there when the mine was working and the township was a thriving community of ˜600 people. The Waiuta Prohibition Mine was one of the richest producing gold mines in the world - it produced 750,000 ounces of gold, and much of its gold is still in the ground - once a part of the mine collapsed, the whole town closed down and emptied out in weeks. In the next couple of years, mining of the area will commence again, but this time they will be going in from about 3kms away and tunnelling in on an angle, rather than opening up the old mine. Apparently there is far more gold left in the seam than was taken out in the years the original mine was open.

One of the aspects of the film that I loved was that it showed the mine site as it was before we started the clean up and had drone shots of when it was cleared and cleaned. And the lovely Jim Staton featured talking about the place. There were also lots of photos of Waiuta Town during its heyday - courtesy of Jos Divis, a miner who was also a photographer and was assiduous in recording all aspects of life there - in the town and down in the mine! You can read more about Waiuta and him here.

So on the Thursday, at the showing there were 5 people who had been involved in the mine clean up: Jim S the DOC Historic Ranger who had originally wanted to get it done before it even got on the Ministry for the Environment's radar, Mark N who handed the task of project managing to me when he was reassigned to developing the Pike 29 Memorial Walk (Paparoa Great Walk), Dean Burwell who was the project manager of the site clean up, and me who did the overall project management and dealt with DOC, MfE, the regional and district councils, managing the budget etc, and Fiona who kept her finger on the pulse of all the administrative tasks that inevitably go with it. It would be safe to say that we were all pretty proud ...

Well, I thought it was funny ...